Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization/Chapter 6

by Edward Burnett Tylor

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

IMAGES AND NAMES.

 

The trite comparison of savages to "grown-up children" is in the main a sound one, though not to be carried out too strictly. In the uncivilized American or Polynesian, the strength of body and force of character of a grown man are combined with a mental development in many respects not beyond that of a young child of a civilized race. It has been already noticed how naturally children can appreciate and understand such direct expressions of thought as the gesture-language and picture-writing. In like manner, the use of dolls or images as an assistance to the operations of the mind is familiar to all children, though among those who grow up under the influences of civilized society it is mostly superseded and forgotten in after life. Few educated Europeans ever thoroughly realize the fact, that they have once passed through a condition of mind from which races at a lower state of civilization never fully emerge; but this is certainly the case, and the European child playing with its doll furnishes the key to several of the mental phenomena which distinguish the more highly cultivated races of mankind from those lower in the scale.

When a child plays with a doll or plaything, the toy is commonly made to represent in the child's mind some imaginary object which is more or less like it. Wooden soldiers, for instance, or the beasts in a Noah's ark, have a real resemblance which any one would recognise at once to soldiers and beasts, and all that the child has to do is to suppose them bigger, and alive, and to consider them as walking of themselves when they are pushed about. But an imaginative child will be content with much less real resemblance than this. It will bring in a larger subjective element, and make a dog do duty for a horse, or a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, representing a ship on the sea, or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or a coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved about in an appropriate manner, and placed in a suitable position with respect to other objects. Unlike as the toy may be to what it represents in the child's mind, it still answers a purpose, and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas, by working the objects and actions and stories it is acquainted with into a series of dramatic pictures. Of how much use the material object is in setting the mind to work, may be seen by taking it away and leaving the child with nothing to play with.

At an early age, children learn more from play than from teaching; and the use of toys is very great in developing their minds by giving them the means of, as it were, taking a scene or an event to pieces, and putting its parts together in new combinations, a process which immensely increases the definiteness of the children's ideas and their power of analysis. It is because the use of toys is principally in developing the subjective side of the mind, that the elaborate figures and models of which the toyshops have been full of late years are of so little use. They are carefully worked out into the nicest details; but they are models or pictures, not playthings, and children, who know quite well what it is they want, tire of them in a few hours, unless, indeed, they can break them up and make real toys of the bits. What a child wants is not one picture, but the means of making a thousand. Objective knowledge, such as is to be gained from the elaborate doll's houses and grocer's shops with their appurtenances, may be got in plenty elsewhere by mere observation; but toys, to be of value in early education, should be separate, so as to allow of their being arranged in any variety of combination, and not too servile and detailed copies of objects, so that they may not be mere pictures, but symbols, which a child can make to stand for many objects with the aid of its imagination.

In later years, and among highly educated people, the mental process which goes on in a child playing with wooden soldiers and horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in the midst of more complex phenomena. Perhaps nothing in after life more closely resembles the effect of a doll upon a child, than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon a grown-up reader. Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite: two artists would make pictures of the same scene that were very unlike one another, the very persons and places depicted are imaginary, and yet what reality and definiteness is given to the scene by a good picture. But in this case the direct action of an image on the mind complicates itself with the deepest problems of painting and sculpture. The comparison of the workings of the mind of the uncivilized man, and of the civilized child, is much less difficult.

Mr. Backhouse one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a native woman arranging several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines. These he learned represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinders Island, known by the name of Mother Brown.^[1] Similar practices are found among far higher races than the ill-fated Tasmanians. Among some North American tribes, a mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets up the cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would have done if the dead baby had been still alive within it.^[2] Here we have no image; but in Africa we find a rude doll, representing the child, kept as a memorial. It is well known that over a great part of Africa the practice prevails, that whenever twin children are born, one or both of them are immediately killed. Among the Wanyamwezi, one of the two is always killed; and, strange to say, "the universal custom amongst these tribes, is for the mother to wrap a gourd or calabash in skins, to place it to sleep with, and feed it like, the survivor."^[3] Bastian saw Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it.^[4] Among the Bechuanas, it is a custom for married women to carry a doll with them till they have a child, when the doll is discarded. There is one of these dolls in the London Missionary Museum, consisting simply of a long calabash, like a bottle, wound round with strings of beads. The Basuto women use clay dolls in the same way, giving them the names of tutelary deities, and treating them as children.^[5] Among the Ostyaks of Eastern Siberia, there is found a still more instructive case, in which we see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual idol. When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him, which receives offerings and has honours paid to it, and the widow embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried at the end of three years or so, but sometimes the image of a shaman^[6] is set up permanently, and remains as a saint for ever.^[7]

The principal use of images to races in the lower stages of civilization is that to which their name of "the visible," ειδωλον, idol, has come to be in great measure restricted in modern language. The idol answers to the savage in one province of thought the same purpose that its analogue the doll does to the child. It enables him to give a definite existence and a personality to the vague ideas of higher beings, which his mind can hardly grasp without some material aid. How these ideas came into the minds of even the lowest savages, need not be discussed here; it is sufficient to know that, so far as we have accurate information, they seem to be present everywhere in at least a rudimentary state.

It does not appear that idols accompany religious ideas down to the lowest levels of the human race, but rather that they belong to a period of transition and growth. At least this seems the only reasonable explanation of the fact, that in America, for instance, among the lowest races, the Fuegians and the Indians of the southern forests, we hear little or nothing of idols. Among the so-called Red Indians of the North, we sometimes find idols worshipped and sacrificed to, but not always, while in Mexico and Peru the whole apparatus of idols, temples, priests, and sacrifices is found in a most complex and elaborate form. It does not seem, indeed, that the growth of the use of images may be taken as any direct measure of the growth of religious ideas, which is complicated with a multitude of other things. Image-worship depends in considerable measure on the representation of ideal beings. In so far as this symbolical element is concerned, it seems that when man has got some way in developing the religious element in him, he begins to catch at the device of setting a puppet or a stone as the symbol and representative of the notions of a higher being which are floating in his mind. He sees in it, as a child does in a doll, a material form which his imagination can clothe with all the attributes of a being which he has never seen, but of whose existence and nature he judges by what he supposes to be its works. He can lodge it in the place of honour, cover it up in the most precious garments, propitiate it with offerings such as would be acceptable to himself. The Christian missionary goes among the heathen to teach the doctrines of a higher religion, and to substitute for the cruder theology of the savage a belief in a God so far beyond human comprehension, that no definition of the Deity is possible to man beyond vague predications, as of infinite power, duration, knowledge, and goodness. It is not perhaps to be wondered at, that the missionary should see nothing in idol-worship but hideous folly and wickedness, and should look upon an idol as a special invention of the devil. He is strengthened, moreover, in such a view by the fact that by the operation of a certain law of the human mind (of which more will be said presently), the idol, which once served a definite and important purpose in the education of the human race, has come to be confounded with the idea of which it was the symbol, and has thus become the parent of the grossest superstition and delusion. But the student who occupies himself in tracing the early stages of human civilization, can see in the rude image of the savage an important aid to early religious development, while it often happens that the missionary is as unable to appreciate the use and value of an idol, as the grown-up man is to realize the use of a doll to a child.

Man being the highest living creature that can be seen and imitated, it is natural that idols should mostly be imitations, more or less rude, of the human form. To show that the beings they represent are greater and more powerful than man, they are often huge in size, and sometimes, by a very natural expedient, several heads and pairs of arms and legs show that they have more wisdom, strength, and swiftness than man. The sun and moon, which in the physical system of the savage are often held to be living creatures of monstrous power, are represented by images. The lower animals, too, are often raised to the honour of personating supernatural powers, a practice which need not surprise us, when we consider that the savage does not set the lower animals at so great a depth below him as the civilized man does, but allows them the possession of language, and after his fashion, of souls, while we perhaps err in the opposite direction, by stretching the great gap which separates the lowest man from the highest animal, into an impassable gulf. Moreover, as animals have some powers which man only possesses in a less degree, or not at all, these powers may be attributed to a deity by personating him under the forms of the animals which possess them, or by giving to an image of human form parts of such animals; thus the feet of a stag, the head of a lion, or the wings of a bird, may serve to express the swiftness or ferocity of a god, or to show that he can fly into the upper regions of the air, or, like the goat's feet of Pan, they may be mere indications of his character and functions.

It is not necessary that the figure of a deity should have the characteristics of the race who worship it; the figure of another race may seem fitter for the purpose. Mr. Catlin, for instance, brought over with him a tent from the Crow Indians, which he describes as having the Great or Good Spirit painted on one side of it, and the Bad Spirit on the other. His drawing, unfortunately, only shows clearly one figure, in the unmistakable uniform of a white soldier with a musket in the one hand and a pipe in the other,^[8] and this may very likely be the figure of the Good Spirit, for the pipe is a known symbol of peace.^[9] But the white man stands also to the savage painter for the portrait of the Evil Demon, especially in Africa, where we find the natives of Mozambique drawing their devil in the likeness of a white man,^[10] while Römer, speaking of the people of the Guinea coast, says that they say the devil is white, and paint him with their whitest colours. The pictures of him are lent on hire for a week or so by the old woman who makes them, to people whom the devil visits at night. When he sees his image, he is so terrified that he never comes back.^[11] This impersonation need not, however, be intended by any means as an insult to the white man. As Captain Burton says of his African name of Muzungu Mbaya, "the wicked white man," it would have been but a sorry compliment to have called him a good white man. Much of the reverence of the savage is born rather of fear than of love, and the white colonist has seldom failed to make out that title to the respect of the savage, which lies in the power, not unaccompanied by the will, to hurt him.

The rudeness and shapelessness of some of the blocks and stones which serve as idols among many tribes, and those not always the lowest, is often surprising. There seems to be mostly, though not always, a limit to the shapelessness of an idol which is to represent the human form; this is the same which a child would unconsciously apply, namely, that its length, breadth, and thickness must bear a proportion not too far different from the proportions of the human body. A wooden brick or a cotton-reel, set up or lying down, will serve well enough for a child to represent a man or woman standing or lying, but a cube or a ball would not answer the purpose so well, and if put for a man, could hardly be supposed even by the imagination of a child to represent more than position and movement, or relative size when compared with larger or smaller objects. Much the same test is applied by the uncivilized man in a particular class of myths or legends, which come to be made on this wise. We all have more or less of the power of seeing forms of men and animals in inanimate objects, which sometimes have in fact a considerable likeness of outline to what they suggest, but which, in some instances, have scarcely any other resemblance to the things into which fancy shapes them than a rough similarity in the proportions of their longer and shorter diameters. Myths which have been applied to such fancied resemblances, or have grown up out of them, may be collected from all parts of the world, and from races high and low in the scale of culture.

Among the Riccaras, there was once a young Indian who was in love with a girl, but her parents refused their consent to the marriage, so the youth went out into the prairie, lamenting his fate, and the girl wandered out to the same place, and the faithful dog followed his master. There they wandered with nothing to live on but the wild grapes, and at last they were turned into stone, first their feet, and then gradually the upper part of their bodies, till at last nothing was left unchanged but a bunch of grapes, which the girl holds in her hand to this day. And all this story has grown out of the fancied likeness of three stones to two human figures and a dog. There are many grapes growing near, and the Riccaras venerate these figures, leaving little offerings for them when they pass by.^[12] So the Seneca Indians affirm that the rounded head-like pebbles on the shore of Lake Canandaigua are the petrified skulls of the devoured tribe disgorged by the great snake in its death-agony.^[13]

There was a Maori warrior named Hau, and his wife Wairaka deserted him. So he followed her, going from one river to the next, and at last he came to one where he looked out slyly from the corner of his eye to see if he could discover her. He breathed hard when he reached the place where Wairaka was sitting with her paramour. He said to her, "Wairaka, I am thirsty, fetch me some water." She got up and walked down to the sea with a calabash in each hand. He made her go on until the waves flowed over her shoulders, when he repeated a charm, which converted her into a rock that still bears her name. Then he went joyfully on his way.^[14]

So the figure of the weeping Niobe turned into a rock, might be seen on Mount Sipylus.^[15] The groups of upright stones, set up by old inhabitants in Africa and India, are now giants, men, flocks and herds changed into stone; the avenues of monoliths at Karnak are petrified battalions; the stone-circles on English downs have suggested other fanciful legends, as where for instance the story has shaped itself that such a ring was a party of girls who were turned into stone for dancing carols on a Sunday.^[16] There is a tradition, probably still current in Palestine, of a city between Petra and Hebron, whose inhabitants were turned into stone for their wickedness. Seetzen, the traveller, visited the spot where the remains of the petrified inhabitants of the wicked city are still to be seen, and, just as in the American tale, he found their heads a number of stony concretions, lying scattered on the ground.^[17] The imagination which could work on these rude objects could naturally discover in stone statues the result of such a transformation. Statues sculptured by a higher Peruvian race at Tiahuanaco, seemed to the ruder Indians petrified men,^[18] and the clumsy stone busts on Asiatic steppes are, to the rude Turanians who worship them, as it were fossilized deities.^[19] Especially the Jewish and Moslem iconoclastic mind thinks ancient statues men transformed by enchantment or judgment, and here we have the source of the Arabian Nights' tale of the infidel city, found with its inhabitants turned to lifelike counterfeits in stone.^[20]

The myths of footprints stamped into the rock by gods or mighty men are hot the least curious of this class, not only from the power of imagination required to see footprints in mere round or long cavities, but also from the unanimity with which Egyptians, Greeks, Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, and Moslems have adopted them as relics, each from their own point of view. The typical case is the sacred footprint of Ceylon, which is a cavity in the rock, 5 feet long by 21/2 feet wide, at the top of Adam's Peak, made into something like a huge footstep by mortar divisions for the toes. Brahmans, Buddhists, and Moslems still climb the mountain to do reverence to it; but to the Brahman it is the footstep of Siva, to the Buddhist of the great founder of his religion, Gautama Buddha, and to the Moslem it is the spot where Adam stood when he was driven from Paradise; while the Gnostics have held it to be the footprint of Ieû, and Christians have been divided between the conflicting claims of St. Thomas and the Eunuch of Candace, Queen of Ethiopia.^[21] The followers of these different faiths have found holy footprints in many countries of the Old World, and the Christians have carried the idea into various parts of Europe, where saints have left their footmarks; while, even in America, St. Thomas left his footsteps on the shores of Bahia, as a record of his mythic journey.^[22]

For all we know, the whole mass of the Old World footprint-myths may have had but a single origin, and have travelled from one people to another. The story is found, too, in the Pacific Islands, for in Samoa two hollow places, near six feet long, in a rock, are shown as the footprints of Tiitii, where he stood when he pushed the heavens up from the earth.^[23] But there are reasons which may make us hesitate to consider the whole Polynesian mythology as independent of Asiatic influence. In North America, at the edge of the Great Pipestone Quarry, where the Great Spirit stood when the blood of the buffalos he was devouring ran down upon the stone and turned it red, there his footsteps are to be seen deeply marked in the rock, in the form of the track of a great bird;^[24] while Mexican eyes could discern in the solid rock at Tlanepantla the mark of hand and foot left by the mighty Quetzalcoatl.^[25]

There are three kinds of prints in the rock which may have served as a foundation for such tales as these. In many parts of the world there are fossil footprints of birds and beasts, many of huge size. The North American Indians also, whose attention is specially alive to the footprints of men and animals, very often carve them on rocks, sometimes with figures of the animals to which they belong. These footprints are sometimes so naturally done as to be mistaken for real ones. The rock of which Andersson heard in South Africa, "in which the tracks of all the different animals indigenous to the country are distinctly visible,"^[26] is probably such a sculptured rock. Thirdly, there are such mere shapeless holes as those to which most or all of the Old World myths seem to be attached. Now the difficulty in working out the problem of the origin of these myths is this, that if the prints are real fossil ones, or good sculptures, stories of the beings that made them might grow up independently anywhere; but one can hardly fancy men in many different places coming separately upon the quaint notion of mere hollows, six feet long, being monstrous footprints, unless the notion of monstrous footprints being found elsewhere were already current. At the foot of the page are references to some passages relating to the subject.^[27]

It has just been remarked that there is a certain process of the human mind through which, among men at a low level of education, the use of images leads to gross superstition and delusion. No one will deny that there is an evident connexion between an object, and an image or picture of it; but we civilized men know well that this connexion is only subjective, that is, in the mind of the observer, while there is no objective connexion between them. By an objective connexion, I mean such a connexion as there is between the bucket in the well and the hand that draws it up,—when the hand stops, the bucket stops too; or between a man and his shadow,—when the man moves, the shadow moves too; or between an electro-magnet and the iron filings near it,—when the current passes through the coil, a change takes place in the condition of the iron filings. These are, of course, crude examples; but if more nicety is necessary, it might be said that the connexion is in some degree what a mathematician expresses in saying that y is a function of x, when, if x changes, y changes too. The connexion between a man and his portrait is not objective, for what is done to the man has no effect upon the portrait, and vice versâ.

To an educated European nowadays this sounds like a mere truism, so self-evident that it is not necessary to make a formal statement of it; but it may nevertheless be shown that this is one of the cases in which the accumulated experience and the long course of education of the civilized races have brought them not only to reverse the opinion of the savage, but commonly to think that their own views are the only ones that could naturally arise in the mind of any rational human being. It needs no very large acquaintance with the life and ways of thought of the savage, to prove that there is to be found all over the world, especially among races at a low mental level, a view as to this matter which is very different from that which a more advanced education has impressed upon us. Man, in a low stage of culture, very commonly believes that between the object and the image of it there is a real connexion, which does not arise from a mere subjective process in the mind of the observer, and that it is accordingly possible to communicate an impression to the original through the copy. We may follow this erroneous belief up into periods of high civilization, its traces becoming fainter as education advances, and not only is this confusion of subjective and objective relations connected with many of the delusions of idolatry, but even so seemingly obscure a subject as magic and sorcery may be brought in great measure into clear daylight, by looking at it as evolved from this process of the mind.

It is related by an early observer of the natives of Australia, that in one of their imitative dances they made use of a grass-figure of a kangaroo, and the ceremony was held to give them power over the real kangaroos in the bush.^[28] In North America, when an Algonquin wizard wishes to kill a particular animal, he makes a grass or cloth image of it, and hangs it up in his wigwam. Then he repeats several times the incantation, "See how I shoot," and lets fly an arrow at the image. If he drives it in, it is a sign that the animal will be killed next day. Again, while an arrow touched by the magical medáwin, and afterwards fired into the track of an animal, is believed to arrest his course, or otherwise affect him, till the hunter can come up, a similar virtue is believed to be exerted, if but the figure of the animal sought be drawn on wood or bark, and afterwards submitted to the influences of the magic medicine and incantation.
Fig. 14.In their picture-writings, a man or beast is shown to be under magic influence by drawing a line from the mouth to the heart, as in the annexed figure, which represents a wolf under the charm of the magician, and corresponds to the incantation sung by the medicine-man, "Run, wolf, your body's mine."^[29] Writing in the last century, Charlevoix remarks that the Illinois and some other tribes make little marmouzets or puppets to represent those whose lives they wish to shorten, and pierce these images to the heart.^[30]

We find thus among the Indians of North America one of the commonest arts of magic practised in Europe in ancient and mediæval tunes. The art of making an image and melting it away, drying it up, shooting at it, sticking pins or thorns into it, that some like injury may befall the person it is to represent, is too well known to need detailed description here,^[31] and it is still to be found existing in various parts of the world. Thus the Peruvian sorcerers are said still to make rag dolls and stick cactus-thorns into them, and to hide them in secret holes in houses, or in the wool of beds or cushions, thereby to cripple people, or turn them sick or mad.^[32] In Borneo the familiar European practice still exists, of making a wax figure of the enemy to be bewitched, whose body is to waste away as the image is gradually melted,^[33] as in the story of Margery Jordane's waxen image of Henry VI. The old Roman law punished by the extreme penalty the slaying of an absent person by means of a wax figure. The Hindoo arts are thus described by the Abbé Dubois:—"They knead earth taken from the sixty-four most unclean places, with hair, clippings of hair, bits of leather, etc., and with this they make little figures, on the breasts of which they write the name of the enemy; over these they pronounce magical words and mantrams, and consecrate them by sacrifices. No sooner is this done, than the grahas, or planets, seize the hated person, and inflict on him a thousand ills. They some- times pierce these figures right through with an awl, or cripple them in different ways, with the intention of killing or crippling in reality the object of their vengeance."^[34] Again, the Karens of Burmah model an image of a person from the earth of his footprints, and stick it over with cotton seeds, intending thereby to strike the person represented with dumbness.^[35] Here we have the making of the figure combined with the ancient practice in Germany known as the "earth-cutting" (erdschnitt), cutting out the earth or turf where the man who is to be destroyed has stood, and hanging it in the chimney, that he may perish as his footprint dries and shrivels.^[36]

In these cases the object in view is to hurt the original through the image, but it is also possible to make an image, transfer to it the evil spirit of the disease which has attacked the person it is to represent, and then send it out like a scapegoat into the wilderness. They conjure devils into puppets in West Africa;^[37] in Siam the doctor makes an image of clay, sends his patient's disease into it, and then takes it away to the woods and buries it;^[38] while the Tunguz cures his leg or his heart by wearing a carved model of the part affected about him.^[39]

The transfer of life or the qualities of a living being to an image may be made by giving it a name, or by the performance of a ceremony over it. Thus, at the festival of the Durga Pûja, the officiating Brahman touches the cheeks, eyes, breast, and forehead of each of the images that have been prepared, and says, "Let the soul of Durga long continue in happiness in this image." Till life is thus given to them, they may not be worshipped.^[40] But the mere making of the image of a living creature is very commonly sufficient to set up at once its connexion with life, among races who have not thoroughly passed out of the state of mind to which these practices belong. Looking at the matter from a very different point of view, and yet with the same feeling of a necessary connexion between life and the image of the living creature, the Moslem holds that he who makes an image in this world will have it set before him on the day of judgment, and will be called upon to give it life, but he will fail to finish the work he has thus left half done, and will be sent to expiate his offence in hell.

With such illustrations to show how widely spread and deeply rooted is the belief that there is a real connexion between a being and its image, we can see how almost inevitable it is, that man at a low stage of education should come to confound the image with that which it was made to represent. The strong craving of the human mind for a material support to the religious sentiment has produced idols and fetishes over most parts of the world, and at most periods in its history; and while the more intelligent, even among many low tribes, have often clearly enough taken the images as mere symbols of superhuman beings, the vulgar have commonly believed that the idols themselves had life and supernatural powers. missionaries have remarked this difference in the views of more and less intelligent members of the same tribe; and it is emphatically true of a large part of Christendom, that the images and pictures, which, to the more instructed, serve merely as a help to realise religious ideas and to suggest devotional thoughts, are looked upon by the uneducated and superstitious crowd as beings endowed not only with a sort of life, but with miraculous influences.^[41]

The line between the cases in which the connexion between object and figure is supposed to be real, and those in which it is known to be imaginary, is often very difficult to draw. Thus idols and figures of saints are beaten and abused for not granting the prayers of their worshippers, which may be a mere expression of spite towards their originals, but then two rival gods may be knocked together when their oracles disagree, that the one which breaks first may be discarded, and here a material connexion must certainly be supposed to exist. To the most difficult class belong the symbolic sacrifices of models of men and animals in Italy and Greece, and the economical paper-offerings of Eastern Asia. The Chinese perform the rite of burning money and clothes for the use of the dead; but the real things are too valuable to be wasted by a thrifty people, so paper figures do duty for them. Thus they set burning junks adrift as sacrifices to get a favourable wind, but they are only paper ones. Perhaps the neatest illustration of this kind of offerings, and of the state of mind in which the offerer makes them, is to be found in Hue and Gabet's story of the Tibetan lamas, who sent horses flying from the mountain-top in a gale of wind, for the relief of wornout pilgrims who could get no further on their way. The horses were bits of paper, with a horse printed on each, saddled, bridled, and galloping at full speed.^[42]

Hanging and burning in effigy is a proceeding which, in civilized countries at any rate, at last comes fairly out into pure symbolism. The idea that the burning of the straw and rag body should act upon the body of the original, perhaps hardly comes into the mind of any one who assists at such a performance. But it is not easy to determine how far this is the case with the New Zealanders, whose minds are full of confusion between object and image, as we may see by their witchcraft, and who also hold strong views about their effigies, and ferociously revenge an insult to them. One very curious practice has come out of their train of thought about this matter. They were very fond of wearing round their necks little hideous figures of green jade, with their heads very much on one side, which are called tiki, and are often to be seen in museums. It seems likely that they are merely images of Tiki, creator of man and god of the dead. They are carried as memorials of dead friends, and are sometimes taken off and wept and sung over by a circle of natives; but a tiki commonly belongs, not to the memory of a single individual, but of a succession of deceased persons who have worn it in their tune, so that it cannot be considered as having in it much of the nature of a portrait.^[43] Some New Zealanders, however, who were lately in London, were asked why these tikis usually, if not always, have but three fingers on their hands, and they replied that if an image is made of a man, and any one should insult it, the affront would have to be revenged, and to avoid such a contingency the tikis were made with only three fingers, so that, not being any one's image, no one was bound to notice what happened to them.

In medicine, the notion of the real connexion between object and image has manifested itself widely in both ancient and modern times. Pliny speaks of the folly of the magicians in using the catanance (κατανάγκη, compulsion) for love-potions, because it shrinks in drying into the shape of the claws of a dead kite (and so, of course, holds the patient fast); but it does not strike him that the virtues of the lithospermum or "stone-seed" in curing calculus were no doubt deduced in just the same way.^[44] In more modern times, such notions as these were elaborated into the old medical theory known as the "Doctrine of Signatures," which supposed that plants and minerals indicated by their external characters the diseases for which nature had intended them as remedies. Thus the Euphrasia or eye- bright was, and is, supposed to be good for the eyes, on the strength of a black pupil-like spot in its corolla, the yellow turmeric was thought good for jaundice, and the blood-stone is probably used to this day for stopping blood.^[45] By virtue of a similar association of ideas, the ginseng, which is still largely used in China, was also employed by the Indians of North America, and in both countries its virtues were deduced from the shape of the root, which is supposed to resemble the human body. Its Iroquois name, abesoutchenza, means "a child," while in China it is called jin-seng, that is to say, "resemblance of man."^[46]

Such cases as these bring clearly into view the belief in a real and material connexion existing between an object and its image. By virtue of their resemblance, the two are associated in thought, and being thus brought into connexion in the mind, it conies to be believed that they are also in connexion in the outside world. Now the association of an object with its name is made in a very different way, but it nevertheless produces a series of very similar results. Except in imitative words, the objective resemblance between thing and word, if it ever existed, is not discernible now. A word cannot be compared to an image or a picture, which, as everybody can see, is like what it stands for; but it is enough that idea and word come together by habit in the mind, to make men think that there is some real bond of connexion between the thing, and the name which belongs to it in their mother-tongue. Professor Lazarus, in his "Life of the Soul," tells a good story of a German who went to the Paris Exhibition, and remarked to his companion what an extraordinary people the French were, "For bread, they say du pain!" "Yes," said the other, "and we say bread." "To be sure," replied the first, "but it is bread, you know."^[47]

As, then, men confuse the word and the idea, in much the same way as they confuse the image with that which it represents, there springs up a set of practices and beliefs concerning names, much like those relating to images. Thus it is thought that the utterance of a word ten miles off has a direct effect on the object which that word stands for. A man may be cursed or bewitched through his name, as well as through his image. You may lay a smock-frock on the door-sill, and pronounce over it the name of the man you have a spite against, and then when you beat that smock, your enemy will feel every blow as well as if he were inside it in the flesh.^[48] Thus, too, when the root of the dead-nettle was plucked to be worn as a charm against intermittent fevers, it was necessary to say for what purpose, and for whom, and for whose son it was pulled up, and other magical plants required also a mention of the patient's name to make them work.^[49]

How the name is held to be part of the very being of the man who bears it, so that by it his personality may be carried away, and, so to speak, grafted elsewhere, appears in the way in which the sorcerer uses it as a means of putting the life of his victim into the image upon which he practises. Thus King James in his 'Dæmonology,' says that "the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness."^[50] A mediæval sermon speaks of baptizing a "wax" to bewitch with; and in the eleventh century, certain Jews, it was believed, made a waxen image of Bishop Eberhard, set about with tapers, bribed a clerk to baptize it, and set fire to it on that sabbath, the which image burning away at the middle, the bishop fell grievously sick and died.^[51]

A similar train of thought shows itself in the belief, that the utterance of the name of a deity gives to man a means of direct communication with the being who owns it, or even places in his hands the supernatural power of that being, to be used at his will. The Moslems hold that the "great name" of God (not Allah, which is a mere epithet), is known only to prophets and apostles, who, by pronouncing it, can transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead, and do any other miracle.^[52]

The concealment of the name of the tutelary deity of Rome, for divulging which Valerius Soranus is said to have paid the penalty of death, is a case in point. As to the reason of its being kept a secret, Pliny says that Verrius Flaccus quotes authors whom he thinks trustworthy, to the effect that when the Romans laid siege to a town, the first step was for the priests to summon the god under whose guardianship the place was, and to offer him the same or a greater place or worship among the Romans. This practice, Pliny adds, still remains in the pontifical discipline, and it is certainly for this reason that it has been kept secret under the protection of what god Rome itself has been, lest its enemies should use a like proceeding.^[53]

Moreover, as man puts himself into communication with spirits through their names, so they know him through his name. In Borneo, they will change the name of a sickly child to deceive the evil spirits that have been tormenting it.^[54] In South America, among the Abipones and Lenguas, when a man died, his family and neighbours would change their own names^[55] to cheat Death when he should come to look for them. As examples of beliefs connected with personal names among more civilized races, may be mentioned the custom in Tonquin of giving young children horrid names to frighten the demons from them,^[56] the Jewish superstition that a man's destiny may be changed by changing his name, and the Abyssinian concealment of the child's real name, lest the Budas should bewitch him through it.^[57]

It is perhaps a falling off from these extreme instances of the intimacy with which name and object have grown together in the savage mind, to cite the practice of exchanging names, which was found in the West Indies at the time of Columbus,^[58] and in the South Seas by Captain Cook, who was called Oree, while his friend Oree went by the name of Cookee.^[59] But Cadwallader Colden's account of his new name is admirable evidence of what there is in a name in the mind of the savage. "The first Time I was among the Mohawks, I had this Compliment from one of their old Sachems, which he did, by giving me his own Name, Cayenderongue. He had been a notable Warrior; and he told me, that now I had a Right to assume to myself all the Acts of Valour he had performed, and that now my Name would echo from Hill to Hill over all the Five Nations." When Colden went back into the same part ten or twelve years later, he found that he was still known by the name he had thus received, and that the old chief had taken another.^[60]

Taking a still wider stretch, the power of association grasps not only the spoken word, but its written representative. It has been seen how the Hindoo sorcerers wrote the name of their victim on the breast of the image made to personate him. A Chinese physician, if he has not got the drug he requires for his patient, will write the prescription on a piece of paper, and let the sick man swallow its ashes, or an infusion of the writing, in water.^[61] This practice is no doubt very old, and may even descend from the time when the picture-element in Chinese writing, now almost effaced, was still clearly distinguishable, so that the patient would at least have the satisfaction of eating a picture, not a mere written word. Whether the Moslems got the idea from them or not, I do not know, but among them a verse of the Koran washed off into water and drunk, or even water from a cup in which it is engraved, is an efficacious remedy.^[62] Here the connexion between the two ends of the chain is very remote indeed. The arbitrary characters, which represent the sound of the word, which represents the idea, have to do duty for the idea itself. The example is a striking one, and will serve to measure the strength of the tendency of the uneducated mind to give an outward material reality to its own inward processes.

This confusion of objective with subjective connexion, which shows itself so uniform in principle, though so various in details, in the practices upon images and names done with a view of acting through them on their originals or their owners, may be applied to explain one branch after another of the arts of the sorcerer and diviner, till it almost seems as though we were coming near the end of his list, and might set down practices not based on this mental process as exceptions to a general rule.

When a lock of hair is cut off as a memorial, the subjective connexion between it and its former owner, is not severed. In the mind of the friend who treasures it up, it recalls thoughts of his presence, it is still something belonging to him. We know, however, that the objective connexion was cut by the scissors, and that what is done to that hair afterwards, is not felt by the head on which it grew. But this is exactly what the savage has not come to know. He feels that the subjective bond is unbroken in his own mind, and he believes that the objective bond, which his mind never gets clearly separate from it, is unbroken too. Therefore, in the remotest parts of the world, the sorcerer gets clippings of the hair of his enemy, parings of his nails, leavings of his food, and practises upon them, that their former possessor may fall sick and die. This is why South Sea Island chiefs had servants always following them with spittoons, that the spittle might be buried in some secret place, where no sorcerer could find it, and why even brothers and sisters had their food in separate baskets. In the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, there was a colony of disease-makers who lived by their art. They collected any nahak or rubbish that had belonged to any one, such as the skin of a banana he had eaten, wrapped it in a leaf like a cigar, and burnt it slowly at one end. As it burnt, the owner got worse and worse, and if it was burnt to the end, he died. When a man fell ill, he knew that some sorcerer was burning his rubbish, and shell-trumpets, which could be heard for miles, were blown to signal to the sorcerers to stop, and wait for the presents which would be sent next morning. Night after night, Mr. Turner used to hear the melancholy too-tooing of the shells, entreating the wizards to stop plaguing their victims. And when a disease-maker fell sick himself, he believed that some one was burning his rubbish, and had his shells too blown for mercy.^[63] It is not needful to give another description after this, the process is so perfectly the same in principle wherever it is found, all over Polynesia,^[64] in Africa,^[65] in India,^[66] in North and South America,^[67] in Australia.^[68] Superstitions of this kind as to hair and nails belong to Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Moslem lore. They are alive to this day in Europe, where, for instance, the German who walks over nails hurts their former owner, and the Italian does not like to trust a lock of his hair in the hands of any one, lest he should be bewitched or enamoured against his will.^[69]

One of the best accounts we have of the art of procuring death by sorcery, is given in Sir James Emerson Tennent's work on Ceylon. It is not that there is much that is peculiar in the processes it describes, but just the contrary; its importance lies in its presenting, among a somewhat isolated race, a system of sorcery, which is quite a little museum of the arts practised among the most dissimilar tribes in the remotest regions of the world. The account is as follows:—"The vidahu stated to the magistrate that a general belief existed among the Tamils [of Ceylon] in the fatal effects of a ceremony, performed with the skull of a child, with the design of producing the death of an individual against whom the incantation is directed. The skull of a male child, and particularly of a first-born, is preferred, and the effects are regarded as more certain if it be killed expressly for the occasion; but for ordinary purposes, the head of one who had died a natural death is presumed to be sufficient. The form of the ceremony is to draw certain figures and cabalistic signs upon the skull, after it has been scraped and denuded of the flesh; adding the name of the individual upon whom the charm is to take effect. A paste is then prepared, composed of sand from the footprints of the intended victim, and a portion of his hair moistened with his saliva, and this, being spread upon a leaden plate, is taken, together with the skull, to the graveyard of the village, where for forty nights the evil spirits are invoked to destroy the person so denounced. The universal belief of the natives is, that as the ceremony proceeds, and the paste dries up on the leaden plate, the sufferer will waste away and decline, and that death, as an inevitable consequence, must follow."^[70] Here we have at once the name, the earth-cutting, the hair and saliva, the cursing, and the drying up. The use of the skull lies in its association with death, and we shall presently find it used in the same way in a very different place.

Even the spirits of the dead may be acted on through the remains of their bodies. Though the savage commonly holds that after death the soul goes its own way, for the most part independently of the body to which it once belonged, yet in his mind the soul and the body of his enemy or his friend are inseparably associated, and thus he comes to hold, in his inconsistent way, that a bond of connexion must after all survive between thorn. Therefore, the African fastens the jaw of his slain enemy to a tabor or a horn, and his skull to the big drum, that every crash and blast may send a thrill of agony through the ghost of their dead owner.^[71]

The connexion between a cut lock of hair and its former owner is, in the mind at least, much closer than is necessary for these purposes. As has been seen, the remains of a person's food are sufficient to bewitch him by. In a witchcraft case in the seventeenth century, the supposed sorceress confessed that "there was a glove of the said Lord Henry buried in the ground, and as that glove did rot and waste, so did the liver of the said lord rot and waste."^[72] Indeed, any association of ideas in a man's mind, the vaguest similarity of form or position, even a mere coincidence in time, is sufficient to enable the magician to work from association in his own mind, to association in the material world. Nor is there any essential difference in the process, whether his art is that of the diviner or of the sorcerer, that is, whether his object is merely to foretell something that will happen to a person, or actually to make that something happen; or if he is only concerned with the searching out of the hidden past, the process remains much the same, the intention only is different.

Out of the endless store of examples, I will do no more than take a few typical cases. They hang up charms in the Pacific Islands to keep thieves and trespassers out of plantations; a few cocoa-nut leaves, plaited into the form of a shark, will cause the thief who disregards it to be eaten by a real one; two sticks, set one across the other, will send a pain right across his body, and the very sight of these tabus will send thieves and trespassers off in terror.^[73] In Kamchatka, when something had been stolen, and the thief could not be discovered, they would throw nerves or sinews into the fire, that as they shrank and wriggled with the heat, the like might happen to the body of the thief.^[74] In New Zealand, when a male child had been baptized in the native manner, and had received its name, they thrust small pebbles, the size of a large pin's head, down its throat, to make its heart callous, hard, and incapable of pity.^[75] Round the neck of a Basuto child in South Africa, one may see hanging a kite's foot to give swiftness, a lion's claw for security, or an iron ring to give a power of iron resistance.^[76] The Red Indian hunter wears ornaments of the claws of the grizzly bear, that he may be endowed with its courage and ferocity,^[77] a simpler charm than that whereby the magicians made men invincible in Pliny's time, in which the head and tail of a dragon, marrow of a lion and hair from his forehead, foam of a victorious racehorse, and claws of a dog, were bound together in a piece of deerskin, with alternate sinews of a deer and a gazelle.^[78] The Tyrolese hunter still wears tufts of eagle's down in his hat, to gain the eagle's keen sight and courage.^[79] Many of the food prejudices of savage races depend on the belief which belongs to this class of superstitions, that the qualities of the eaten pass into the eater. Thus, among the Dayaks, young men sometimes abstain from the flesh of deer, lest it should make them timid, and before a pig-hunt they avoid oil, lest the game should slip through their fingers,^[80] and in the same way the flesh of slow-going and cowardly animals is not to be eaten by the warriors of South America; but they love the meat of tigers, stags, and boars, for courage and speed.^[81] An English merchant in Shanghai, at the time of the Taeping attack, met his Chinese servant carrying home a heart, and asked him what he had got there. He said it was the heart of a rebel, and that he was going to take it home and eat it to make him brave. The very same thing is recorded in Ashanti, where the chiefs ate the heart of Sir Charles M'Carthy, to obtain his courage.^[82]

When a Maori war-party is to start, the priests set up sticks in the ground to represent the warriors, and he whose stick is blown down is to fall in the battle.^[83] In the Fiji Islands, the diviner will shake a bunch of dry cocoa-nuts to see whether a sick child will die; if all fall off, it will recover; if any remain on, it will die. He will spin a cocoa-nut, and decide a question according to where the eye of the nut looks towards when at rest again, or he will sit on the ground and take omens from his legs; if the right leg trembles first, it is good; if the left, it is evil; or he will decide by whether a leaf tastes sweet or bitter, or whether he bites it clean through at once, or whether drops of water will run down his arm to the wrist, and give a good answer, or fall off by the way and give a bad one.^[84] In British Guiana, when young children are betrothed, trees are planted by the respective parties in witness of the contract, and if either tree should happen to wither, the child it belongs to is sure to die.^[85] A slightly different idea appears north of the Isthmus, in the Central American tale, where the two brothers, starting on their dangerous journey to the land of Xibalba, where their father had perished, plant each a cane in the middle of their grandmother's house, that she may know by its flourishing or withering whether they are alive or dead.^[86] And again, to take stories from the Old World, when Devasmita would not let Guhasena leave her to go with his merchandise to the land of Cathay, Siva appeared to them in a dream, and gave to each a red lotus that would fade if the other were unfaithful;^[87] and so, in the German tale, when the two daughters of Queen Wilowitte were turned into flowers, the two princes who were their lovers had each a sprig of his mistress's flower, that was to stay fresh while their love was true.^[88]

On this principle of association, it is easy to understand how, in the Old World, the names of the heavenly bodies, and their position at the time of a man's birth, should have to do with his character and fate; while, in the astrology of the Aztecs, the astronomical signs have a similar connexion with the parts of the human body, so that the sign of the Skull has to do with the head, and the sign of the Flint with the teeth.^[89] Why fish may be caught in most plenty when the Sun is in the sign of Pisces, is as clear as the reason why trees are to be felled, or vegetables gathered, or manure used, while the moon is on the wane, for these things have to fall, or be consumed, or rot; while, on the other hand, grafts are to be set while the moon is waxing,^[90] and it is only lucky to begin an undertaking when the moon is on the increase, as has been held even in modern times. It is as clear why the Chinese doctor should administer the heads, middles, and roots of plants, as medicine for the heads, bodies, and legs of his patients respectively, and why passages in books looked at while some thought is in the reader's mind, should be taken as omens, from Western Europe to Eastern Asia, in old times and new. When it is borne in mind that the Tahitians ascribe their internal pains to demons who are inside them, tying their intestines in knots, it becomes easy to understand why the Laplanders, under certain circumstances, object to knots being tied in clothes, and how it comes to pass that in Germany witches are still believed to tie magic knots, which bring about a corresponding knotting inside their victims' bodies. And so on from one phase to another of witchcraft and superstition.

It would be quite intelligible on this principle, that the sorcerer should think it possible to impress his own mind upon the outer world, even without any external link of communication. The mere presence of the thought in his mind might be enough to cause, as it were by reflection, a corresponding reality. He is usually found, however, working his will by some material means, or at least by an utterance of it into the world. This seems to be the case with the rainmaker, or weather-changer, wherever he is met with, that is to say, among most races of man below the highest culture. Sometimes he works by clear association of ideas, as the Samoan rainmakers with their sacred stone, which they wet when they want rain, and put to the fire to dry when they want to dry the weather,^[91] or the Lapland wizards, with the winds they used to sell to our sea-captains in a knotted cord, to be let out by untying it knot by knot. In the notable practice of killing an enemy by prophesying that he will die, or by uttering a wish that he may, the outward act of speech comes between the thought and the reality, but perhaps a mere unspoken wish may be held sufficient. This kind of bewitching is found over almost as wide a range as the practices of the rainmaker, and extends like them into the upper regions of our race.

"There dwalt a weaver in Moffat toun,
That said the minister wad dee sune;
The minister dee'd; and the fouk o' tho toun,
They brant the weaver wi' the wudd o' his lume,
And ca'd it weel-wared on the warlock loon."^[92]

As has been so often said, these two arts are encouraged by the unfailing test of success, if they have but time enough, and the latter justifies itself by killing the patient through his own imagination. When he hears that he has been "wished," he goes home and takes to his bed at once. It is impossible to realize the state of mind into which the continual terror of witchcraft brings the savage. It is held by many tribes to be the necessary cause of death. Over great part of Africa, in South America and Polynesia, when a man dies, the question is at once, "who killed him?" and the soothsayer is resorted to to find the murderer, that the dead man may be avenged. The Abipones held that there was no such thing as natural death, and that if it were not for the magicians and the Spaniards, no man would die unless he were killed. The notion that, after all, a man might perhaps die of himself, comes out curiously in the address of an old Australian to the corpse at a funeral, "If thou comest to the other black fellows and they ask thee who killed thee, answer, 'No one, but I died.'"^[93]

There are of course branches of the savage wizard's art that are not connected with the mental process to which so many of his practices may be referred. He is often a doctor with some skill in surgery and medicine, and an expert juggler; and often, though knavery is not the basis of his profession, a cunning knave. One of the most notable superstitions of the human race, high and low, is the belief in the Evil Eye. Knowing, as we all do, the strange power which one mind has of working upon another through the eye, a power which is not the less certain for being wholly unexplained, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that the belief in the mysterious influences of the Evil Eye flows from the knowledge of what the eye can do as an instrument of the will, while experience has not yet set such limits as we recognize to the range of its action. The horror which savages so often have of being looked full in the face, is quite consistent with this feeling. You may look at him or his, but you must not stare, and above all, you must not look him full in the face, that is to say, you must not do just what the stronger mind does when it uses the eye as an instrument to force its will upon the weaker.

It is clear that the superstitions which have been cursorily described in this chapter, are no mere casual extravagances of the human mind. The way in which the magic arts have taken to themselves the verb to "do," as claiming to be " doing," par excellence, sometimes gives us an opportunity of testing their importance in the popular mind. As in Madagascar sorcerers and diviners go by the name of mpiasa, and in British Columbia of ooshtuk-yu, both terms meaning "workers,"^[94] so words in the languages of our Aryan race show a like transition. In Sanskrit, magic has possessed itself of a whole family of words derived from kr, to "do," krtya, sorcery, krtvan, enchanting, (literally, working,) kârmana, enchantment (from karman, a deed, work), and so on, while Latin facere has produced in the Romance languages Italian fattura, enchantment, old French faiture, Portuguese feitiço (whence fetish), and a dozen more, and Grimm holds that the most probable derivation of zauber, Old High German zoupar, is from zouwan, Gothic táujan, to do, as modern German anthun means to bewitch, and other like etymologies are to be found.^[95] The belief and practices to which such words refer form a compact and organic whole, mostly developed from a state of mind in which subjective and objective connexions are not yet clearly separated. What then does this mass of evidence show from the ethnologist's point of view; what is the position of sorcery in the history of mankind?

When Dr. Martius, the Bavarian traveller, was lying one night in his hammock in an Indian hut in South America, and all the inhabitants seemed to he asleep, each family in its own place, his reflexions were interrupted by a strange sight. "In a dark corner there arose an old woman, naked, covered with dust and ashes, a miserable picture of hunger and wretchedness; it was the slave of my hosts, a captive taken from another tribe. She crept cautiously to the hearth and blew up the fire, brought out some herbs and bits of human hair, murmured something in an earnest tone, and grinned and gesticulated strangely towards the children of her masters. She scratched a skull, threw herbs and hair rolled into balls into the fire, and so on. For a long while I could not conceive what all this meant, till at last springing from my hammock and corning close to her, I saw by her terror and the imploring gesture she made to me not to betray her, that she was practising magic arts to destroy the children of her enemies and oppressors." "This," he continues, "was not the first example of sorcery I had met with among the Indians. When I considered what delusions and darkness must have been working in the human mind before man could come to fear and invoke dark unknown powers for another's hurt,— when I considered that so complex a superstition was but the remnant of an originally pure worship of nature, and what a chain of complications must have preceded such a degradation," etc. etc.^[96]

I cannot but think that Dr. Martius's deduction is the absolute reverse of the truth. Looking at the practices of sorcery among the lower races as a whole, they have not the appearance of mutilated and misunderstood fragments of a higher system of belief and knowledge. Among savage tribes we find families of customs and superstitions in great part traceable to the same principle, the confusion of imagination and reality, of subjective and objective, of the mind and the outer world. Among the higher races we find indeed many of the same customs, but they are scattered, practised by the vulgar with little notion of their meaning, looked down upon with contempt by the more instructed, or explained as mystic symbolisms, and at last dropped off one by one as the world grows wiser. There is a curious handful of plain savage superstitions among the rules to which the Roman Flamen Dialis had to conform. He was not only prohibited from touching a dog, a she-goat, raw meat, beans, and ivy, but he might not even name them, he might not have a knot tied in his clothes, and the parings of his nails and the clippings of his hair were collected and buried under a lucky tree.^[97] So little difference does the mere course of time make in such things as these, that a modern missionary to a savage tribe may learn to understand them better than the Romans who practised them two thousand years ago.

It is quite true that there are anomalies among the superstitious practices of the lower races, proceedings of which the meaning is not clear, signs of the breaking-down or stiffening into formalism of beliefs carried down by tradition to a distance from their source; and besides, the rites of an old religion, carried down through a new one, may mix with such practices as have been described here, while the adherents of one religion are apt to ascribe to magic the beliefs and wonders of another, as the Christians held Odin, and the Romans Moses, to have been mighty enchanters of ancient times. But when we see the whole system of sorcery and divination comparatively compact and intelligible among savage tribes, less compact and less intelligible among the lower civilized races, and still less among ourselves, there seems reason to think that such imperfection and inconsistency as are to be found among this class of superstitions in the lower levels of our race, are signs of a degeneration (so to speak) from a system of error that was more perfect and harmonious in a yet lower condition of mankind, when man had a less clear view of the difference between what was in him and what was out of him, than the lowest savages we have ever studied, when his life was more like a long dream than even the life that the Puris are leading at this day, deep in the forests of South America.

There is a remarkable peculiarity by which the sorcery of the savage seems to repudiate the notion of its having come down from something higher, and to date itself from the childhood of the human race. There is one musical instrument (if the name may be allowed to it) which we give over to young children, who indeed thoroughly appreciate and enjoy it,—the rattle.

"Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law.
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw."

When the dignity of manhood is to be conferred on a Siamese prince by cutting his hair and giving him a new dress, they shake a rattle before him as he goes, to show that till the ceremony is performed, he is still a child. As if to keep us continually in mind of his place in history, the savage magician clings with wonderful pertinacity to the same instrument. It is a bunch of hoofs tied together, a blown bladder with peas in it, or, more often than anything else, a calabash with stones or shells or bones inside. It is his great instrument in curing the sick, the accompaniment of his medicine-songs, and the symbol of his profession, among the Red Indians, among the South American tribes, and in Africa. For the magician's work, it holds its own against far higher instruments, the whistles and pipes of the American, and even the comparatively high-class flutes, harmonicons, and stringed instruments of the negro.^[98] Next above the rattle in the scale of musical instruments is the drum, and it too has been to a great extent adopted by the sorcerer, and, often painted with magic figures; it is an important implement to him in Lapland, in Siberia, among some North American and some South American tribes.^[99] The clinging together of savage sorcery with these childish instruments, is in full consistency with the theory that both belong to the infancy of mankind. With less truth to nature and history, the modern spirit-rapper, though his bringing up the spirits of the dead by doing hocus-pocus under a table or in a dark room is so like the proceedings of the African mganga or the Red Indian medicine-man, has cast off the proper accompaniments of his trade, and juggles with fiddles and accordions.

The question whether there is any historical connexion among the superstitious practices of the lower races, is distinct from that of their development from the human mind. On the whole, the similarity that runs through the sorcerer's art in the most remote countries, not only in principle, but so often in details, as for instance in the wide prevalence of the practice of bewitching by locks of hair and rubbish which once belonged to the victim, often favours the view that these coincidences are not independent growths from the same principle, but practices which have spread from one geographical source. I have put together in another place (Chapter X.) some accounts of one of the most widely spread phenomena of sorcery, the pretended extraction of bits of wood, stone, hair, and such things, from the bodies of the sick, which is based upon the belief that disease is caused by such objects having been conjured into them. The value of this belief to the ethnologist depends much on its being difficult to explain it, and therefore also difficult to look upon it as having often arisen independently in the human mind. But from the intelligible, and to a particular state of mind one might even say reasonable, beliefs and practices which have been described in the present chapter, it seems hardly prudent to draw inferences as to the descent and communication of the races among whom they are found, at least while the ethnological argument from beliefs and customs is still in its infancy.

To turn now to a different subject, the same state of mind which has had so large a share in the development of sorcery, has also manifested itself in a very remarkable series of observances regarding spoken words, prohibiting the mention of the names of people, or even sometimes of animals and things. A man will not utter his own name; husband and wife will not utter one another's names; the son or daughter-in-law will not mention the name of the father or mother-in-law, and vice versâ; the names of chiefs may not be uttered, nor the names of certain other persons, nor of superhuman beings, nor of animals and things to which supernatural powers are ascribed. These various prohibitions are not found all together, but one tribe may hold to several of them. A few details will suffice to give an idea of the extent and variety of this series of superstitions.

The intense aversion which savages have from uttering their own names, has often been noticed by travellers. Thus Captain Mayne says of the Indians of British Columbia, that "one of their strangest prejudices, which appears to pervade all tribes alike, is a dislike to telling their names—thus you never get a man's right name from himself; but they will tell each other's names without hesitation."^[100] So Dobrizhoffer says that the Abipones of South America think it a sin to utter their own names, and when a man was asked his name, he would nudge his neighbour to answer for him,^[101] and in like manner, the Fijians and the Sumatrans are described as looking to a friend to help them out of the difficulty, when this indiscreet question is put to them.^[102]

Nor does the dislike to mentioning ordinary personal names always stop at this limit. Among the Algonquin tribes, children are generally named by the old woman of the family, usually with reference to some dream, but this real name is kept mysteriously secret, and what usually passes for the name is a mere nickname, such as "Little Fox," or "Red-Head." The real name is hardly ever revealed even by the grave-post, but the totem or symbol of the clan is held sufficient. The true name of La Belle Sauvage was not Pocahontas, "her true name was Matokes, which they concealed from the English, in a superstitious fear of hurt by the English, if her name was known."^[103] "It is next to impossible to induce an Indian to utter personal names; the utmost he will do, if a person implicated is present, is to move his lips, without speaking, in the direction of the person." Schoolcraft saw an Indian in a court of justice pressed to identify a man who was there, but all they could get him to do was to push his lips towards him.^[104] So Mr. Backhouse describes how a native woman of Van Diemen's Land threw sticks at a friendly Englishman, who in his ignorance of native manners, mentioned her son, who was at school at Newtown.^[105]

In various parts of the world, a variety of remarkable customs are observed between men and women, and their fathers- and mothers-in-law. These will be noticed elsewhere, but it is necessary to mention here, that among the Dayaks of Borneo, a man must not pronounce the name of his father-in-law;^[106] among the Omahas of North America, the father- and mother-in-law do not speak to their son-in-law, or mention his name,^[107] nor do they call him or he them by name among the Dacotahs.^[108] Again, the wife is in some places prohibited from mentioning her husband's name. "A Hindoo wife is never, under any circumstances, to mention the name of her husband. 'He,' 'The Master,' 'Swainy,' etc., are titles she uses when speaking of, or to her lord. In no way can one of the sex annoy another more intensely and bitterly, than by charging her with having mentioned her husband's name. It is a crime not easily forgiven."^[109] In East Africa, among the Barea, the wife never utters the name of her husband, or eats in his presence, and even among the Beni Amer, where the women have extensive privileges and great social power, the wife is still not allowed to eat in the husband's presence, and only mentions his name before strangers.^[110] The Kafir custom prohibits wives from speaking the names of relatives of their husbands and fathers-in-law. In Australia, among the names which in some tribes must not be spoken, are those of a father- or mother-in-law, of a son-in-law, and of persons in some kind of connexion by marriage. Another of the Australian prohibitions is not only very curious, but is curious as having apparently no analogue elsewhere. Among certain tribes in the Murray River district, the youths undergo, instead of circumcision, an operation called wharepin, and afterwards, the natives who have officiated, and those who have been operated upon, though they may meet and talk, must never mention one another's names, nor must the name of one even be spoken by a third person in the presence of the other.^[111]

It is especially in Eastern Asia and Polynesia, that we find the names of kings and chiefs held as sacred, and not to be lightly spoken. In Siam, the king must be spoken of by some epithet;^[112] in India and Burmah, the royal name is avoided as something sacred and mysterious; and in Polynesia, the prohibition to mention chiefs' names has even impressed itself deeply in the language of the islands where it prevails.^[113]

But it is among the most distant and various races that we find one class of names avoided with mysterious horror, the names of the dead. In North America, the dead is to be alluded to, not mentioned by name, especially in the presence of a relative.^[114] In South America, he must be mentioned among the Abipones as "the man who does not now exist," or some such periphrasis;^[115] and the Fuegians have a horror of any kind of allusion to their dead friends, and when a child asks for its dead father or mother, they will say, "Silence! don't speak bad words."^[116] The Samoied only speaks of the dead by allusion, for it would disquiet them to utter their names.^[117] The Australians, like the North Americans, will set up the pictured crest or symbol of the dead man's clan, but his name is not to be spoken. Dr. Lang tried to get from an Australian the name of a native who had been killed. "He told me who the lad's father was, who was his brother, what he was like, how he walked when he was alive, how he held the tomahawk in his left hand instead of his right (for he had been left-handed), and with whom he usually associated; but the dreaded name never escaped his lips; and I believe no promises or threats could have induced him to utter it."^[118] The Papuans of the Eastern Archipelago avoid speaking the names of the dead, and in Africa, a like prejudice is found among the Masai.^[119] In the Old World, Pliny says of the Roman custom, "Why, when we mention the dead, do we declare that we do not vex their memory?"^[120] and indeed, the superstition is still to be found in modern Europe, and better marked than in ancient Rome; perhaps nowhere more notably than in Shetland, where it is all but impossible to get a widow, at any distance of time, to mention the name of her dead husband, though she will talk about him by the hour. No dead person must be mentioned, for his ghost will come to him who speaks his name.^[121]

To conclude the list, the dislike to mentioning the names of spiritual or superhuman beings, and everything to which super- natural powers are ascribed, is, as everyone knows, very general. The Dayak will not speak of the small-pox by name, but will call it "the chief" or "jungle leaves," or say "Has he left you?"^[122] The euphemism of calling the Furies the Eumenides, or 'gracious ones,' is the stock illustration of this feeling, and the euphemisms for fairies and for the devil are too familiar to quote. The Yezidis, who worship Satan, have a horror of his name being mentioned. The Laplanders will call the bear "the old man with the fur coat," but they do not like to mention his name; and East Prussian peasants still say that in midwinter you must speak of the wolf as "the vermin," not call him by name, lest werewolves tear you.^[123] In Asia, the same dislike to speak of the tiger is found in Siberia, among the Tunguz;^[124] and in Annam, where he is called "Grandfather" or "Lord,"^[125] while in Sumatra, they are spoken of as the "wild animals" or "ancestors."^[126] The name of Brahma is a sacred thing in India, as that of Jehovah is to the Jews, not to be uttered but on solemn occasions. The Moslem, it is true, has the name of Allah for ever on his lips, but this, as has been mentioned, is only an epithet, not the "great name."

Among this series of prohibitions, several cases seem, like the burning in effigy among the practices with images, to fall into mere association of ideas, devoid of any superstitious thought. The names of husbands, of chiefs, of supernatural beings, or of the dead, may be avoided from an objection to liberties being taken with the property of a superior, from a dislike to associate names of what is sacred with common life, or to revive hateful thoughts of death and sorrow. But in other instances, the notion comes out with great clearness, that the mere speaking of a name acts upon its owner, whether that owner be man, beast, or spirit, whether near or far off. Sometimes it may be explained by considering supernatural creatures as having the power of hearing their names wherever they are uttered, and as sometimes coming to trouble the living when they are thus disturbed. Where this is an accepted belief, such sayings as "Talk of the Devil and you see his horns," "Parlez du Loup," etc., have a far more serious meaning than they bear to us now. Thus an aged Indian of Lake Michigan explained why the native wonder-tales must only be told in the winter, for then the deep snow lies on the ground, and the thick ice covers up the waters, and so the spirits that dwell there cannot hear the laughter of the crowd listening to their stories round the fire in the winter lodge. But in spring the spirit-world is all alive, and the hunter never alludes to the spirits but in a sedate, reverent way, careful lest the slightest word should give offence.^[127] In other cases, however, the effect of the utterance of the name on the name's owner would seem to be different from this. The explanation does not hold in the case of a man refusing to speak his own name, nor would he be likely to think that his mother-in-law could hear whenever he mentioned hers.

Some of these prohibitions of names have caused a very curious phenomenon in language. When the prohibited name is a word in use, and often when it is only something like such a word, that word has to be dropped and a new one found to take its place. Several languages are known to have been specially affected by this proceeding, and it is to be remarked that in them the causes of prohibition have been different. In the South Sea Islands, words have been tabued, from connexion with the names of chiefs; in Australia, Van Diemen's Land, and among the Abipones of South America, from connexion with the names of the dead; while in South Africa, the avoidance of the names of certain relatives by marriage has led to a result in some degree similar.

Captain Cook noticed in Tahiti that when a chief came to the royal dignity, any words resembling his name were changed. Even to call a horse or a dog "Prince" or "Princess," was disgusting to the native mind.^[128] Polack says that from a New Zealand chief being called "Wai," which means "water," a new name had to be given to water. A chief was called "Maripi," or "knife;" and knives were called, in consequence, by another name, "nekra."^[129] Hale, the philologist to the U. S. Exploring Expedition, gives an account of the similar Tahitian practice known as te pi, by virtue of which, for instance, the syllable tu was changed even in indifferent words, because there was a king whose name was Tu. Thus fetu (star) was changed to fetia, tui (to strike) became tiai, and so on.^[130]

Mentioning the Australian prohibition of uttering the names of the dead, Mr. Eyre says:—"In cases where the name of a native has been that of some bird or animal of almost daily recurrence, a new name is given to the object, and adopted in the language of the tribe. Thus at Moorunde, a favourite son of the native Tenberry was called Torpool, or the Teal; upon the child's death the appellation of tilquaitch was given to the teal, and that of torpool altogether dropped among the Moorunde tribe."^[131] The change of language in Tasmania, which has resulted from dropping the names of the dead, is thus described by Mr. Milligan:—"The elision and absolute rejection and disuse of words from time to time has been noticed as a source of change in the Aboriginal dialects. It happened thus:—The names of men and women were taken from natural objects and occurrences around, as, for instance, a kangaroo, a gum-tree, snow, hail, thunder, the wind, the sea, the Waratah—or Blandifordia or Boronia when in blossom, etc., but it was a settled custom in every tribe, upon the death of any individual, most scrupulously to abstain ever after from mentioning the name of the deceased,—a rule, the infraction of which would, they considered, be followed by some dire calamities: they therefore used great circumlocution in referring to a dead person, so as to avoid pronunciation of the name,—if, for instance, William and Mary, man and wife, were both deceased, and Lucy, the deceased sister of William, had been married to Isaac, also dead, whose son Jemmy still survived, and they wished to speak of Mary, they would say 'the wife of the brother of Jemmy's father's wife,' and so on. Such a practice must, it is clear, have contributed materially to reduce the number of their substantive appellations, and to create a necessity for new phonetic symbols to represent old ideas, which new vocables would in all probability differ on each occasion, and in every separate tribe; the only chance of fusion of words between tribes arising out of the capture of females for wives from hostile and alien people,—a custom generally prevalent, and doubtless as beneficial to the race in its effects as it was savage in its mode of execution."^[132]

Martin Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, gives the following account of the way in which this change was going on in the language of the Abipones in his time. "The Abiponian language is involved in new difficulties by a ridiculous custom which the savages have of continually abolishing words common to the whole nation, and substituting new ones in their stead. Funeral rites are the origin of this custom. The Abipones do not like that anything should remain to remind them of the dead. Hence appellative words bearing any affinity with the names of the deceased are presently abolished. During the first years that I spent amongst the Abipones, it was usual to say Hegmalkam kahamátek? 'When will there be a slaughtering of oxen?' On account of the death of some Abipone, the word kahamátek was interdicted, and, in its stead, they were all commanded, by the voice of a crier, to say, Hegmalkam néger- katà? The word nihirenak, a tiger, was exchanged for apañigehak; peûe, a crocodile, for kaeprhak, and kaúma, Spaniards, for Rikil, because these words bore some resemblance to the names of Abipones lately deceased. Hence it is that our vocabularies are so full of blots, occasioned by our having such frequent occasion to obliterate interdicted words, and insert new ones."^[133]

In South Africa, it appears that some Kafir tribes drop from their language words resembling the names of their former chiefs. Thus the Ama-Mbalu do not call the sun by its ordinary Zulu name i-langa, but their first chief's name having been Ulanga, they use the word i-sota instead. It is also among the Kafirs that the peculiar custom of uku-hlonipa is found, which is remarked upon by Professor Max Müller in his second course of lectures.^[134] The following account of it is from another source, the Rev. J. L. Döhne, who thus speaks of it under the verb hlonipa, which means to be bashful, to keep at a distance through timidity, to shun approach, to avoid mentioning one's name, to be respectful. "This word describes a custom between the nearest relations, and is exclusively applied to the female sex, who, when married, are not allowed to call the names of the relatives of their husbands nor of their fathers-in-law. They must keep at a distance from the latter. Hence they have the habit of inventing new names for the members of the family, which is always resorted to when those names happen to be either derived from, or are equivalent to some other word of the common language, as, for instance, if the father or brother-in-law is called Umehlo, which is derived from amehlo, eyes, the isifazi [female sex] will no longer use amehlo but substitute amakangelo (lookings), etc., and hence, the izwi lezifazi, i.e.: women-word or language, has originated."^[135]

Other instances of change of language by interdicting words are to be found. The Yezidis, who worship the devil, not only refuse to speak the name of Sheitan, but they have dropped the word shat, "river," as too much like it, and use the word nahr instead. Nor will they utter the word keitan, "thread," or "fringe," and even naal, "horse-shoe," and naal-band, "farrier," are forbidden words, because they approach to laan, "curse," and maloun, "accursed."^[136] It is curious to observe that a "disease of language" belonging to the same family has shown itself in English speaking countries and in modern times. In America especially, a number of very harmless words have been "tabooed" of late years, not for any offence of their own, but for having a resemblance in sound to words looked upon as indelicate, or even because slang has adopted them to express ideas ignored by a somewhat over-fastidious propriety. We in England are not wholly clear from this offence against good taste, but we have been fortunate in seeing it developed into its full ugliness abroad, and may hope that it is checked once for all among ourselves.

It may be said in concluding the subject of Images and Names, that the effect of an inability to separate, so clearly as we do, the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in the mind, shows itself very fully and clearly in the superstitious beliefs and practices of the untaught man, but its results are by no means confined to such matters. It is not too much to say that nothing short of a history of Philosophy and Religion would be required to follow them out. The accumulated experience of so many ages has indeed brought to us far clearer views in these matters than the savage has, though after all we soon come to the point where our knowledge stops, and the opinions which ordinary educated men hold, or at least act upon, as to the relation between ideas and things, may come in time to be superseded by others taken from a higher level. But between our clearness of separation of what is in the mind from what is out of it, and the mental confusion of the lowest savages of our own day, there is a vast interval. Moreover, as has just been said, the appearance even in the system of savage superstition, of things which seem to have outlived the recollection of their original meaning, may perhaps lead us back to a still earlier condition of the human mind. Especially we may see, in the superstitions connected with language, the vast difference between what a name is to the savage and what it is to us, to whom "words are the counters of wise men and the money of fools." Lower down in the history of culture, the word and the idea are found sticking together with a tenacity very different from their weak adhesion in our minds, and there is to be seen a tendency to grasp at the word as though it were the object it stands for, and to hold that to be able to speak of a thing gives a sort of possession of it, in a way that we can scarcely realize. Perhaps this state of mind was hardly ever so clearly brought into view as in a story told by Dr. Lieber. "I was looking lately at a negro who was occupied in feeding young mocking-birds by the hand. 'Would they eat worms?' I asked. The negro replied, 'Surely not, they are too young, they would not know what to call them.' "^[137]

1. Backhouse, 'Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies;' London, 1843, p. 104.
2. Catlin, vol. ii. p. 133.
3. Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 23.
4. Bastian, vol. ii. p. 376.
5. Casalis, p. 251.
6. A shaman is a native sorcerer or medicine-man. His name is corrupted from Sanskrit çramana, a Buddhist ascetic, a term which is one of the many relics of Buddhism in Northern Asia, having been naturalized into the grovelling fetish-worship of the Ostyaks and Tunguzes. See Weber, 'Indische Skizzen,' p. 66.
7. Erman, 'Reise um die Erde;' Berlin, 1833–43, vol. ii. p. 677. 'Voyages au Nord,' vol. viii. p. 415.
8. Catlin, vol. i. p. 44.
9. Sir G. Simpson, 'Narrative of a Journey round the World'; London, 1847, vol. i. p. 75.
10. Purchas, vol. v. p. 768. See Livingstone, 'Missionary Travels, etc., in South Africa;' London, 1857, p. 465. See also Marco Polo, in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 163.
11. L. F. Römer, 'Nachr. von der Küste Guinea's'; Copenhagen, Leipzig, 1769, p. 43. See Waitz, vol. ii. p. 503.
12. Lewis and Clarke, Expedition; Philadelphia, 1814, p. 107.
13. Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 323.
14. W. B. Baker, On Maori Popular Poetry, Trans. Eth. Soc.; London, 1861, p. 49.
15. Pausanias, i. 21.
16. See Forbes-Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland;' Edinburgh, 1866, vol. i. p. 191. William of Malmesbury, ii. 174; see Liebrecht in Heidelberger Jahrbücher, 1868, p. 328.
17. Kenrick, 'Essay on Primæval History;' London, 1846, p. 41.
18. Cieza de Leon, Travels (tr. and ed. by Markham), Hakluyt Soc. 1864, p. 378.
19. Latham, 'Descriptive Ethnology;' vol. i. p. 360.
20. Lane, 'Thousand and One Nights,' vol. iii. p. 141. M. A. Walker, 'Macedonia, London, 1864, p. 48.
21. Tennent, 'Ceylon;' vol. ii. p. 132. Scherzer, Voy. of the Novara, E. Tr.; London, 1861, etc., vol. i. p. 413.
22. Southey, 'History of Brazil;' London, 1822, vol. I.: Sup. p. xx.
23. Rev. G. Turner, 'Nineteen Years in Polynesia;' London, 1861, p. 245.
24. Catlin, vol. ii. p. 165, etc.
25. J. Q. Müller, 'Amerikanische Urreligionen;' Basle, 1855, p. 578, see 272.
26. C. J. Andersson, Lake Ngami, etc., p. 327.
27. Lyell, Second Visit to U. S.; London, 1850, vol. ii. p. 313. C. Hamilton Smith, Nat. Hist. of Human Species; Edinburgh, 1848, p. 35. Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 74. Burton, 'Central Africa;' vol. i. p. 288. Squier and Davis, Anct. Mon. of Mssi. Valley, vol. i. of Smithsonian Contr.; Washington, 1848, p. 293. Rawlinson, Herodotus; book ii. 91. iv. 82.
28. Collins, 'New South Wales;' London, 1798, vol. i. p. 569.
29. Schoolcraft, part i. pp. 372, 380–382, part ii. p. 180. See 'Narrative of John Tanner,' part ii.
30. Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 88. See Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. iii. p. 214.
31. Jacob Grimm, 'Deutsche Mythologie,' Gottingen, 3rd Edit.; 1854, p. 1045, etc. Brand, 'Popular Antiquities,' Bohns Series; London, 1855, vol. iii. pp. 10, 52, 141.
32. Rivero and Tschudi, p. 181.
33. St. John, vol ii. p. 260.
34. Dubois, 'Mœurs, etc., des Peuples de l'Inde;' Paris, 1825, vol. ii. p. 63.
35. Mrs. Mason, 'Civilizing Mountain Men;' London, 1862, p. 121. See Mason in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, part ii. 1865, p. 224.
36. Grimm, D. M., p. 1047. Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube;' Hamburg, 1860, pp. 102, 120.
37. Hutchinson. in Tr. Eth. Soc.; London, 1861, p. 336.
38. Bowring, 'Siam;' London, 1857, vol. i. p. 139.
39. Ravenstein, 'The Russians on the Amur;' London, 1861, p. 351.
40. Coleman, 'The Mythology of the Hindus;' London, 1832, p. 83.
41. For discussion of image-worship or idolatry, where the image is considered to be actually animated by a human soul or divine spirit which has taken up its abode in it as a body, see Tylor, 'Primitive Culture,' chap. xiv. [Note to 3rd Edition.]
42. Hue and Gabet, 'Voy. dans la Tartarie, etc.;' Paris, 1850, vol. ii. p. 136.
43. Hale, in U. S. Exploring Exp.; Philadelphia, vol. vi., 1846, p. 23. W. Yate. 'Account of New Zealand;' London, 1835, p. 151; R. Taylor, 'New Zealand and its Inhabitants,' 2nd ed., London, 1870, chap. vi.
44. Plin. xxvii. 35, 74.
45. Paris, 'Pharmacologia;' London, 1843, p. 47.
46. Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 24. For a similar case, see the 'Penny Cyclopædia,' art. "Atropa Mandragora" (mandrake).
47. Lazarus, 'Leben der Seele;' Berlin, 1856–7, vol. ii. p. 77.
48. Kuhn, 'Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks;' Berlin, 1859, p. 227. Wuttke, pp. 16, 67.
49. Plin., xxii. 16, 24; xxiii. 54.
50. Brand, vol. iii. p. 10.
51. Grimm, D. M., p. 1047.
52. Lane, Mod. Eg., vol. i. p. 361.
53. Plin., xxviii. 4. Plut., Q. R. Macrob., Sat., iii. 9. See Bayle, art. "Soranua."
54. St. John, 'Borneo,' vol. i. p. 197.
55. Dobrizhoffer, 'The Abipones,' E. Tr.; London, 1822, vol. ii. p. 273. Southey, 'History of Brazil;' London, 1819, vol. iii. p. 394.
56. Richard, 'Tonquin,' in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 734.
57. Eisenmenger, part i. p. 489. Parkyns, 'Abyssinia,' vol. ii. p. 146.
58. 'Letters of Columbus' (Hakluyt Soc.); London, 1847, p. 217. Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles;' Rotterdam, 1658, p. 458.
59. Cook, First Voy. H, vol. ii. p. 251. Second Voyage; London, 2nd edit., 1777, vol. i. p. 167. See Dumont d'Urville, 'Voy. de l'Astrolabe,' vol. i. p. 189 (Australia).
60. Colden, 'Hist. of the Five Indian Nations of Canada;' London, 1747, part i p. 10.
61. Davis, vol. ii. p. 215.
62. Lane, Mod. Eg., vol. i. p. 347–8. Petherick, Egypt, etc.; Edinburgh, 1861, p. 221.
63. Turner, 'Polynesia,' pp. 18, 89, 424.
64. Polack, 'Manners and Customs of the New Zealandere;' London, 1840, vol. i. p. 282. Ellis, vol. ii. p. 228. Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 249. Purcbas, vol. ii. p. 1652, etc.
65. Casalis, p. 276. J. L. Wilson, p. 215. D. & C. Livingstone, 'Exp. to Zambesi;' London, 1865, p. 46.
66. Roberts, Or. Illustr., p. 470.
67. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 168. Fitz Roy, in Tr. Eth. Soc.; London, 1861, p. 5. Forbes in Journ. Eth. Soc. vol. ii. p. 236.
68. Stanbridge, id. p. 299.
69. See Lipschutz, 'De Communi Humani Generis Origine;' Hamburg, 1864, p. 59, etc.; Lane, Thousand and One N., vol. ii. p. 215; Story, Roba di Roma, vol. ii. p. 342.
70. Tennent, 'Ceylon,' vol. ii. p. 545.
71. Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 112. Klemm, C. G., vol. iii. p. 352.
72. Brand, vol. iii. p. 29.
73. Turner, p. 294.
74. Kracheninnikow, Descr. du Kamtchatka; Paris, 1768, p. 22. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 297.
75. Yate, p. 83.
76. Casalis, p. 271.
77. Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 69.
78. Plin., xxix. 20.
79. Wuttke, p. 188.
80. St. John, vol. i. p. 176.
81. Dobrizhoffer, vol. i. p. 258. Rochefort, p. 410.
82. J. L. Wilson, p. 168.
83. Polack, vol. i. p. 270.
84. Williams, 'Fiji,' p. 228.
85. Rev. J. H. Bernau, 'Missionary Labours in British Guiana;' London, 1847, p. 59.
86. Brasseur, 'Popol Vuh:' Paris, 1861, p. 141.
87. Somadeva Bhatta, vol. i. p. 139.
88. J. and W. Grimm, 'Kinder und Hausmärchen;' Göttingen, 1857–6, vol. i. p. 427, vol. iii. pp. 145, 328. See also Bastian, vol. iii. p. 193 (Papuans); Dumont d'Urville, vol. v. p. 444 (New Zealand).
89. Kingsborough, Vatican MS., vol. ii. pl. 75; vols. v. and vi. Expl.
90. Plin., ix. 35; xviii. 75; xvii. 24.
91. Turner, p. 347, and see p. 428.
92. R. Chambers, 'Popular Rhymes of Scotland;' Edinburgh, 1826, p. 23.
93. Lang, 'Queensland;' London, 1861, p. 360.
94. Ellis, 'Madagascar;' vol. i. p. 73. Sproat, 'Scenes of Savage Life,' p. 169.
95. Pictet, 'Origines;' part ii. p. 641. Diez, Wörterb. s. v. "fattizio." Grimm, D. M. p. 984, etc. See Diefenbach, Vergl. Wörterb. i. 12; ii. 659.
96. Dr. v. Martius, 'Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Amerikanischen Menschheit;' 1839. But see below, chap. xiii., as to this eminent ethnologist's change of opinion.
97. Aulus Gellius, 'Noctes Atticæ,' x. 15 Plut., Q. R., cix. etc.
98. Catlin, vol. i. p. 39, 109. Schoolcraft, part i. p. 310; part ii. p. 179. Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 187 Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. i. p. 44; vol. ii. p. 295. Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1339, 1520, etc. etc. Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 72. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 169, 171–2. See Strabo, xv. 1, 22.
99. Regnard, 'Lapland," in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 168, 180. Ravenstein, p. 93. Molina, 'Hist. of Chile," E. Tr.; London, 1809, vol. ii. p. 106. Falkner, 'Patagonia,' Hereford, 1774, p. 117. See Bastian, vol. ii. p. 123.
100. Mayne, 'British Columbia,' etc.; London, 1862, p. 278.
101. Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 444. See also Cullen, 'Darien Indians,' in Tr. Eth. Soc. vol. iv. p. 265.
102. Seemann, 'Viti;' London, 1862, p. 190. Marsden, Hist. of Sumatra; London, 1811, p. 286.
103. Schoolcraft, part ii. p 65.
104. Id. p. 433. Sec also Burton, 'City of the Saints,' p. 141.
105. Backhouse, 'Australia,' p. 93.
106. St. John, vol. i. p. 51.
107. Long's Exp., vol. i. p. 253.
108. Schoolcraft, part. ii. p. 196.
109. F. de W. Ward, 'India and the Hindoos;' London, 1853, p. 189.
110. Munzinger, 'Ostafrikanische Studien;' Schaffhausen, 1864, pp. 325, 526.
111. Eyre, vol. ii. pp. 336–9. The wharepin is a ceremonial depilation.
112. Bowring, p. 88.
113. Polack, vol. i. p. 38.
114. Simpson, Journey, vol. i. p. 130. Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 234.
115. Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 273.
116. Despard, 'Fireland' (' Sunday at Home,' Oct. 31, 1863).
117. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 226.
118. Lang, 'Queensland,' pp. 367, 387. Eyre, l. c.
119. Bastian, vol. ii. p. 276. etc. See also Fontana, 'Nicobar Is.' in As. Res., vol. iii. p. 154. Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' p. 169.
120. Plin., xxviii. 5.
121. Mrs. Edmondston, 'Shetland Islands;' Edin. 1856, p. 20.
122. St. John, vol. i. p. 62.
123. Wuttke, p. 118. See also Grimm, D. M., p. 633, 1213.
124. Ravenstein, p. 382.
125. Mouhot, 'Travels in Indo-China,' etc.; London, 1864, vol. i. p. 263.
126. Marsden, p. 292.
127. Schoolcraft, part iii. pp. 314, 492.
128. Cook, Third Voyage, vol. ii. p. 170.
129. Polack, vol. i. p. 38 (mikara?); vol. ii. p. 126.
130. Hale, in U. S. Exp., vol. vi. p. 288. Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 2nd series; London, 1864, pp. 34–41. Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p. 520.
131. Eyre, vol. ii. p. 354.
132. Milligan, in Papers, etc., of Roy. Soc. of Tasmania, vol. iii. part ii. 1859, p. 281.
133. Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 203.
134. Max Müller, l. c.
135. Döhne, 'Zulu-Kafir Dictionary;' Cape Town, 1857, s. v. hlonipa. See Bastian, 'Rechtsverhältnisse,' p. 352 (name of King of Wadai).
136. Layard, 'Nineveh;' London, 1849, vol. i. p. 297.
137. Lieber, 'Laura Bridgeman;' Smithsonian C., 1851, p. 9.