IT is not to be supposed that life, soul, spirit, possessing emotional, volitional, and factual potency, was limited in savage man's conception to the tangible and visible. If the soul of man was itself invisible, and if soul were a possession of plants, animals, and other natural objects, yet perceived only by its operations, why should there not be other souls "loose in the universe," unseen and unfelt except as they revealed themselves by their activities or manifestations to the world of sense? So man seems to have reasoned, and this belief abides today in the minds of the mass of mankind, even in Christendom. Spirits, unfixed so to speak, having form and substance, indeed, but not body, roamed free and unfettered in air, on land, in the waters. They lurked in nook and cranny, behind bush and tree and rock; they came in storm and wind; they inhabited the woods, floated in the atmosphere, swam in the sea and in lake and stream, parched in the desert, bid in cave or roamed on mountain top. Wherever mystery is possible, there man imagines non-human spirits to exist. A suggestion of the enormity of the numbers of spirits whose existence is conceived is given by the following from the strongly animistic Shinto faith of Japan in comparatively modern times.
"Reverently adoring the great god of the two palaces of Ise (the sun-goddess) in the first place, the 800 myriads of celestial karma the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the 1,500 myriads to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places in the great land of eight islands, the 1,500 myriads of kami whom they cause to serve them. . . . I pray with awe that they will deign to correct the unwitting faults which, heard and seen by them, I have committed, and, blessing and favouring me according to. the powers which they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine example, and to perform good works in the way."[1]
Examples at almost any length might be
[1. Quoted by Carpenter, Comparative Religion, p. 93, from a morning prayer by Hirata, a Japanese (1776-1843).]
cited from modern works of contemporaries. Only a few instances will be given here simply to illustrate the principle. Central Australians believe in the existence of Wullunqua, a dread spirit which inhabits a deep water hole.[2] And other tribes of that continent have similar traditions, such as the Narrinyeri, who know of a like spirit, the Mulgewauke.[3] By the inhabitants of New Guinea spirits, non-human, are supposed to inhabit any place with unusual physical charaderistics--waterfall, pool, queer-shaped rock, or the like.[4] Of the Guiana native Im Thum says:
"His whole world swarms with beings. He is surrounded by a host of them, possibly harmful. It is therefore not wonderful that the Indian fears to be without his fellow., fears even to move beyond the light of his camp-fire, and when obliged to do so, carries a fire-brand with him, that he may have a chance of seeing the beings among whom he moves."[5]
Truly the angelology and demonology of advanced faiths have a long ancestry.
[2. Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, etc., passim.
3. Taplin, Narrinyeri, pp. 48, 91.
4. Williamson, Ways of South Sea Savage, p. 283
5. Among the Indians of Guiana.]
As already suggested, the groundwork for such a faith was already laid in the observations and deductions regarding man's soul. If in sleep his spirit could go forth unseen by companions who were near, in order that it might perform the deeds of the dream state so real to the savage; if it were true that a faint were caused by the temporary desertion of its home by the soul; if at death it could depart without detection by those intent in their watch over the ailing, and reveal its invisibility by going forth unseen to a disembodied existence, why should there not be numerous other spirits - either temporarily or permanently and by nature bodiless - abroad in the universe? This would be normal reasoning, and was actual. The belief is so well known, evidences of it are so easily accessible, that direct demonstration here is hardly obligatory. As a matter of fact, in parts of our discussion yet to come, the proof will appear incidentally, so that to give it here would be but to duplicate what is both implicit and explicit in testimony on another but related line of investigation.
In a recent paragraph the words "angelology" and "demonology" were employed, and in their use there is implicit a fundamental philosophy which has swayed the conceptions, awakened the hopes and aroused the fears, helped to form the cults, and controlled the actions of men in all ages and climes for which direct testimony is adducible. The dualism of substance, body and spirit, inherent in the notions of animism is paralleled by a coincident dualism of character. There were good spirits and bad, white spirits and black. And this character was determined by their supposed favor or disfavor toward man. There were also good spirits which by reason of their emotional natures were capable of showing inimical traits, while the bad might be pacified, rendered innocuous or even friendly, by the appropriate treatment.
This is, of course, but the reflection of men's interpretation of their own nature and experiences, the result of their reasoning about that nature and those experiences. Sometimes enterprises went awry without any cause to them discoverable; again, good fortune attended their ventures, and this in spite of what seemed to them legitimate fears and untoward beginnings. But on the hypothesis of hosts of invisible beings all about them, good or ill fortune was fully accounted for by the direction or interference of these spirits in man's favor or against him. To any event or happening otherwise unaccountable a cause was assigned in the action of spirits which worked when, where, and how they pleased. And as the human being was amenable to gift or praise or request, so would the spirits yield to similar courses of treatment. As he was vexed or angered by opposition to his will or by actual harm, so, he reasoned, the spirits could be enraged by human doings contrary to their desires. Once more, just as he might, when angered, be placated by use of the proper means, so would the spirits be soothed and rendered benign were they properly approached. As he succumbed or gave way before force greater than his own or was overcome by craft and cunning, the spirits too must yield if force majeure could be brought to bear on them or if they could be outwitted.
THE existence and great numbers of spirits which are, so to speak, "free" in the universe have just been shown and discussed.[1] We have noted, too, how readily enters here all that we are accustomed to call miraculous. Only we have constantly to remember that what we call by that name is to primitive people in full accordance with nature as they understand it. The very conception of miracle implies arrival at the thought of a certain uniformity of nature, invariability of cause and effect outside of which the unexpected may happen - and does. It now remains to consider the constitution and activities of the "free" spirits referred to above. A poetical description, having its origin in Babylonia, may here be quoted and serve as a starting point.
[1. Above, pp. 97 ff.]
Great storms sent from heaven, are they,
The owl that hoots in the city, are they,
Of Anu's creation,[2] children born of earth, are they,
The highest walls, the broadest walls, like a flood, they pass,
From house to house they break through,
No door can shut them out,
No bolt can turn them back,
Through the door like a snake, they glide,
Through the hinge like a wind, they blow.[2a]
Indeed their substance is even more subtle than this account indicates. They can invade a body already possessed by its own spirit and dominate that body for good or evil, or even drive out the native spirit and autocratically rule the captured body. The capture may be temporary or permanent. The words "demoniac" in English, {éntheos} and; {nymphtholeptos}[3] in Greek, express the two facts of "possession" for evil or for good. Similarly
[2. Assyr. lit. "outpouring," i.e., of semen.
2a. From cuneiform tablet V, lines 18-35, in the Utukki Limnuti series (Cuneiform Texts XVI. plate 2); translation kindly furnished by the Rev. Professor Robert W. Rogers, D.D., LL.D., of Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J.
3. Plato, Phædrus, 238, 241.]
the word "ecstasy" (Greek {ékstasis})[4] sets forth the belief in the temporary departure from the body of its own spirit, sometimes for communion apart from the body with other spirits; and another Greek word, {enthysiasmós}, denotes the entrance into the human organism of a superhuman spirit and the consequent elevation of feeling and surge of emotion. Though the examples thus far cited register the conceptions of peoples advanced in culture, like Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians, they are not the possession exclusively of such; indeed they are survivals from a cruder age. Primitive peoples low in the scale of culture entertain them. Such folk think of the spirits as pervasive and subtle, to whom no doors are closed; as entering with equal facility portals barred with the grosser materials--wood, iron, or stone--or with the living flesh.[5]
While thus in a manner insubstantial and ethereal in constitution, like discarnated human spirits, they have needs, wants, and preferences to which the material may minister. If the gods in the Babylonian epic of the
[4. New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, iv. 71-72.
5. Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. ii ff.]
deluge could smell the savor of the postdiluvian offering and "hover like flies over the sacrifice,"[6] not less susceptible to appeals offered by material substance are the spirits now under consideration. They have the enjoyments and repulsions of the senses - smell, taste, even grosser physical passions,[7] and so are propitiable or susceptible of anger. While free to roam, they have chosen homes and haunts all their own,[8] though they may become localized in objects of nature, as in India,[9] where so often a stone is the seat of deity, and among the Fang and Mpongwe, so that it seems as if nature is lawless and hostile.[10]
As for disposition, since primitive man measures all things by himself, only intensifying the idea of power--through the use of his imagination, where the element of mystery enters--it would be expected that spirits would be good, evil, or neutral except when
[6. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, p. 98.
7 Frazer, Scapegoat, pp. 112-113; Gen. 6: 1-4; Tobit 8:1-3; Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 213; Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 194-204; Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 127.
8. Keller, Madagascar, p. 98.
9. Methodist Recorder (London), July 10, 1913.
10 Milligan, Fetish Folk, p. 279.]
conciliated or offended,[11] that good spirits could be aroused to wrath by neglect or affront, while evil spirits could be appeased, mollified, or at least rendered harmless by right measures. Some of these spirits are portrayed as jealous and envious, particularly hostile to strangers, and disliking to hear praise of those mortals or their progeny who inhabit the land where these spirits live.[12] New Guineans, however proud of wife, children, or possessions, never praise them but always speak in deprecatory terms. They also dislike to go into the region of another tribe, even for medical treatment, lest the spirits there resident be offended and work them harm.[13] It will be seen at once how these beliefs affect habits of travel and social intercourse.
The varied names of different kinds of spirits are probably a legacy from very early times. We may gather something from our own folk-lore, which mentions fairies and pixies, gnomes, trolls, fauns, satyrs, and dwarfs, elves, vampires, and goblins, sirens, mermaids,
[11. Cox, Folk-lore, chap. III.
12 Parker, Village Folk Tales of Ceylon, i. 16, et passim.
12. Newton, In Far New Guinea, pp. 86, 120.]
and kelpies, nymphs, dryads, and naiads, and all their ilk, whose existence and habits are better known to nurses and nursery children than to the unimaginative scientist. While these creatures are not indeed the free spirits of whom we are speaking, they illustrate the belief in such spirits. For these familiars of childhood are no modern creation, they are survivals of pre-Christian faith, and like the free spirits have all the variety that wild imagination could conjure.[14]
It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the same fate may overtake them as could threaten gods themselves in ancient Egypt-they were not above the hap of death. In Ceylon the Yaka (a sort of evil spirit) is mortal.[15] It may be that out of this thought grew some of the notions respecting the mentality of spirits. We have seen that they are placable and conciliable; they are also compellable and beguilable--by bluff, magic, or threat or use of means productive of results pleasant or repugnant to them.[16]
[14 Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 27.
15. Parker, Village Folk Tales, pp. 143, 265, 274.
16. Tobit, 8:1-3; D'Alviella, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 87 ff.; Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43; Furness, Head-hunters, pp. 16-17; Weeks, Congo Cannibals, pp. 267 ff.; Kloss, In the Andamans, pp. 230 ff.]
It will at once appear how fruitful this idea is in connection with shamanism. Sometimes the only control of spirits and salvation of the people is through shamans.[17] The Wollunqua of Central Australia, a snake spirit, can be either pacified or coerced by magical ceremonies into doing no harm to celebrants of certain rites.[18] The Narrinyeri often have a mock fight in pretense of avenging a death accredited to sorcery.[19] Some Australians are particularly assured that these spirits may be outwitted.[20] The Ceylonese are convinced that a Yaka (the man-eating demon referred to above).[21] may be bluffed into good behavior. The Ainu of Japan also regard spirits as beguilable.[22]
If spirits are compellable, submissive to control by mortals such as medicine men and the like, the way is open for a whole series of attacks in which not only the wills of the spirits but those of mortals, friends, and
[17. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 150 ff.
18. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 238.
19 Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 21.
20. Curr, Australian Race, i. 87; Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 463, 473, 481.
21 Parker, Village Folk Tales, p. 149.
22 Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43.]
enemies combine to the resultant weal or woe of human beings. Wizardry and sorcery, with their awful fears and dread results, enter by this as by other doors. And this is by no means always sheer imposture, as the following shows.
"The sorcerer believes in his own power, and the people believe in it too. Certainly the New Guinea philosophy of life is that nothing happens to man without some cause; no man dies a natural death, all suffering and sickness is due to evil spirits which people this world, and as, like many of his white brethren, he is quite prepared to take the good things of life unquestioning, and only to look for causes when evil comes, there is no place in his philosophy for good spirits; the good is but the normal state undisturbed by the machinations of evil spirits, and the evil spirits are usually set to work by some human agent. Though it seems that while the sorcerer may use charms, working through the hair that has been mislaid when the head was shaven, or through the footprints, he is powerful enough to work at times more directly. He is probably a man of stronger character than his fellows--like other trades, it runs in certain families -and the very fact that he believes in his power, and others believe in it, tends to make him independent and strong in character. He thrives on his reputation, and levies blackmail on all and sundry till some evil day when patience has been exhausted, and an opportunity offers to put him out of the way. Ordinarily he is safe, for no one will touch him or interfere with him unless he can be taken by surprise, and there are always sufferers ready to take the first chance of doing that. How they used to terrorize the neighborhood and take toll! One old ruffian, whose reputation had spread far and wide, could go to villages far from home, and walk off with anything he fancied, the people sitting mum not daring to say a word, or hiding and skulking away as he passed through the village. One of the strongest characters: in a village miles away from where this villain lived said, 'Give me a guaranty that I shall not be called to account, and a gun so that I can shoot him when he is not looking, and I will get rid of him, but I dare not touch him if his eyes are on me.'"[23] But apart from action by these beings
[23. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 78.]
which is determined by human will, desire, vengeance, and other passions, man is an object of interest to the spirits themselves, and they show activity in one way or another, for good or for ill effect upon his fortunes and his person. It is, however, for ill that their principal activity is directed, as estimated by primitives. They work mainly against man and his welfare. In Ceylon, for instance, where innumerable evil spirits are to be found, they are charged with every untoward happening, either as themselves purposing it or as controlled or instigated by inimical magicians, or even because opportunity offers and their essential nature prompts to its seizure.[24] They interpenetrate the bodies of living men and cause illness; they may be expelled by divine power, and still, notwithstanding that they have done assault and damage, may demand and be accorded offerings, sacrifices, and libations.[25] In fact, among rude peoples, diseases are nearly universally attributed to evil spirits through the medium of possession.[26] Not seldom control is by a witch, in whose
[24. Parker, Village Folk Tales, p. 16; cf. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 194 ff.
25. Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends, pp. 11 ff.
26. Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 42-43.]
body the spirit of mischief takes up its residence. Thence she sends it forth on its mission of evil, and thither it returns when its work is done. As she can thus by proxy effect evil, so can she cause it to cease.[27] Naturally this notion lingers on into advanced stages of culture, as is witnessed by the frequent mention of demoniacs in the New Testament, to say nothing of the witchcraft delusion which came on down through the Middle Ages into comparatively modern times.[28] In these advanced stages it is not unusual for these demons to specialize, so to speak, in diseases; so that in China, India, and elsewhere there may be a cholera devil, a dog-god who sends whooping cough, etc.[29] Infants are particularly liable to attack.[30] The normal result is that in some regions drugs and simples are little resorted to in sickness, medicine men and wizards are the main reliance or the only recourse.[31] These spirits
[27. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 83.
28. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 164 ff.; Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, pp. 176, 196; Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 286.
29. Cf. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, iii. 148 ff., 1181.
30. Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 71.
31. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 183; IAE, vi. 85 ff.]
sometimes work in a way different from possession; for example, causing fever by enticing the soul from the body.[32] We may not forget that the madness of frenzy, whether as insanity or as prophetic mania, is regarded, as we have already had occasion to notice, as the result of possession.[33]
The damaging activities of these spirits may be directed not only against the persons, but against the possessions and all the various operations and pursuits of humans.[34] And such evils may at times be prevented or remedied by means as weird as the alleged or supposed disease or hurt. For example, damage by spirits to a plot of agricultural ground may be prevented by killing, boiling, and burying a black cat by night under a tree in the field.[35] All along the line of these conceptions, the promptings to magical operations are the nearly universal accompaniment.
[32. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 185 ff.
33. Additional cases are cited in Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, pp. 254, 278, 279, 285.
34. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 245
35. Jahn, Opfergrbräuche, p. 267.]
MANY and wide-branched are the results that flow from the anthropomorphizing by man of other objects in nature, from the transference to them, in thought, of personality with all its qualities, and from the conception that unseen and intangible, yet in effect substantial, beings exist "free" in the universe. Among the most interesting results are those that issue as almost a necessary consequence of this estimate of things interchange of form and mode of being. Indeed, this lies on the very surface of the conception, although its logical relationship does not seem to have been pointed out.
If man, stones, trees, plants, animals, spirits, and gods are all in the same scale of existence, why should they not exchange forms, undergo metamorphosis? Why should not the soul of a man enter the body of a being in what we regard as a different scale of existence and animate it either in play or in earnest, voluntarily or under stress of superior power exerted by some other superior in the necessary amount or quality of force, and do this either temporarily or permanently? What is to hinder, for example, man's becoming an animal, especially if he does not distinguish between his own being and that of an animal?[1] Or, on the contrary, why should not animals become men? And why should not countless changes take place among other grades of existence? In fact, according to savage man's account of things, all this does occur. Body and soul, we have seen, constitute a duality, in which, in the stage of thought we are examining, the soul is, so to speak, a free partner, able to take its flight and often to return and resume its normal activities in its own abode. It is the "separable" factor, with a life all its own, the seat of impulse, will, passion, and desire. We have, therefore, now to develop the fact of the easy passage from what modern man would regard as one grade of existence to another, either lower or higher,
[1. See above, p. 8, and cf Rivers, Melanesian Society, i. 151 ff., where persons in Banks Islands are believed to be plants, animals, etc., with appropriate taboos.]
or the possession of qualities by one class of beings which in a more sophisticated stage of culture is considered the exclusive possession of a different class.
Supernatural or semi-human beings are conceived as having or assuming the form of birds, animals, serpents, etc., in what we might call their normal state, but by putting off their covering of skin, feather, or scale may assume the human form divine. Among illustrations of this occur with greatest frequency the mouse, jackal, monkey, dove, and tortoise.[2] Obassi Osaw, one of the two great beings worshipped by the Etoi of Africa, was originally a man and a chief.[3] In the Oceanican mythology the firemaking gods appear to have the form of birds.[4] Maui, the Polynesian hero, was able to assume the form of animal, bird, or insect, and Rupe, another being in the same cycle of stories, changes himself into a bird.[5] Among the Ainus a goddess may
[2. Parker, Village Folk Tales, pp. 308ff.; Frere, Old Deccan Days, pp. 183, 193; Stokes, Indian Fairy Tales, pp. 41 ff.; Swynnerton, Indian Nights Entertainment, p. 344; Natesu Sestri, Madana Kama Raja, pp. 56, 57.
3. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 183, 184.
4. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, passim.
5. Ib., pp. 11, 20, 24, 38, 114, 125-126.]
become a flower, a woman, or a frog.[6] Reference may be made in passing to the gods of Egypt, with their composite make-up of bird, reptile, or beast and man. There seems to be good reason for holding that this composite form is not original, and that the partly human form is the result of the refining influence of culture. Originally, it seems, the forms were those of birds, beasts, etc. Certainly the explanation given that the gods were once in human form and that, hard pressed by their enemies, they took the form of beasts in order to deceive or elude their oppressors, is purely animistic and in accord with the principle under exposition.
The cases where superhuman beings take human form are innumerable, apart altogether from the usual course of anthropomorphization of the gods. In the Old Testament the appearances to Adam, Abram, Lot, Gideon, and Manoah occur to the mind at once.[7] In "Hordedef's Tale" four female deities and one male god assume human shape.[8]
This being so, it is not at all wonderful
[6. Batchelor, Ainu, pp. 26, 262-263.
7. Gen. 3:8; 18:2 ff.; 19:1 ff.; Judges 6:12; 13:3, 9, etc.
8. Petrie, Egyptian Tales, i. 33 ff.]
that mating takes place between these different orders and that offspring partaking of the qualities of both are produced.[9] Especially do superhuman beings mate with humans, earth- and heaven-born beings marry. Outside the mythology of classical Greece detailing the amours of the Olympians of both sexes from Zeus down, one may recall the union of the "sons of God" and the daughters of men; the numerous cases in the poems of Homer, Pindar, and Vergil where the heroes boast a mingled ancestry partly divine; the many tribes whose eponym is a being semi-divine, such as the Koyis of India, who trace their origin to the union of Bhima and a wild woman; and the beautiful story of Ono (which is typical of several cycles of tales), who greatly longed for his ideal of feminine beauty. She finally appeared and became his wife. With the birth of their son there appeared also in the neighborhood a dog which became intensely hostile to Ono's wife. One day the animal attacked her with unusual fury; then in uncontrollable fear she resumed her former shape as a fox, leaped the fence, and disappeared. In this case the myth has
[9. Rivers, Melanesian Society, i. 25-26.]
a rather uncertain meaning: some construe it as indicating that a fox had assumed the form of a woman; another and more probable reading is that we have to do here with a sort of genie in animal shape; a third interpretation is that the fox shape was assumed for escape. The second rendering or the first accords with the hostility of the dog, which recognized his enemy though in another (human) form.[10]
With the prevalence of such views as these it is not strange that the origin of children is often sought not in the sexual act but in some chance affair, and that "miraculous" conception or even the virgin birth is no stranger in popular beliefs.[11] It must be remembered, in considering this particularly errant idea, that nine months elapse between conception and birth, and a considerable number of weeks between conception and the knowledge that a new life has begun. The idea is therefore not surprising to one who realizes how aberrant is savage reasoning in tracing cause and effect. And when to this added the conservatism
[10. Gen. 6:1-4; Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, p. 78; Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 340; J. C. Berry, in Blakeslee, Japan and Japanese-American Relations, p. 139.
11 Milloué, in Revue de 1'histoire de la religion, xlix (1904), 34-47.]
of the primitive thinker, the tenacity with which he holds to notions that have once gained entrance, the fear of letting go of these notions and of admitting that what has been his faith is mistaken, we may begin to realize how such beliefs, once entertained, persist. Thus, in the New Hebrides "women sometimes have a notion that the origin, the beginning, of one of their children is a cocoanut, or a breadfruit."[12] Mr. Frazer points out what is indicated above, that the connection between sexual intercourse and conception is unknown.[13] To the more sophisticated, indeed, this error seems not only impossible but literally ridiculous. Mr. Frazer goes on to show that at the moment when life is first perceived the mother may be intensely observant of some natural object, and [through the ideas of interpenetration of spirit to be dealt with later] she supposes being or power to have passed from the object, entered her body, and produced the effect she feels. Consequently "she might imagine that the spirit of a kangaroo, of grass-seed, of water, or of a gum-tree (or of any other object) had passed into her, and accordingly that her child . . .
[12. Codrington, JAI, xviii. 310-311.
13. FR, Sept. 1905.]
was really a kangaroo . . . though to the bodily eye it presented the outward form of a human being." Mr. Todd has also registered the fact[14] that conception is ascribed to various objects, animate and inanimate. Among American Indians rain falling on a maiden's navel induces conception.[15] And among the Nigerian peoples a child may come into being through incarnation of a human spirit or by the entrance into the mother of tree-spirits.[16]
If human beings can arise from sources such as these, it will not come as a surprise if we find that whole tribes trace descent from animals or plants, or make alliances with them. This, however, raises the large question of totemism, which can not be treated here. Mention is made of the subject in order to avoid the appearance of overlooking this very important phase or consequence of animistic thinking. The single example may be noted here of the Etoi of Africa, who hold the crab to have been grandfather to a tribe.[17]
One of the important results of this mode of thought is the belief that men, either voluntarily
[14. Todd, Primitive Family, pp. 70ff.
15. Fewkes, American Ethnology, 28th Report, pp. 44, 48, 65, etc.
16. Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 31.
17. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 196.]
or under force majeure exercised by sorcerer or witch, pass from the human to the brute form of life. Among the concomitants of the belief in witches existent as late as in the eighteenth century and so balefully dominant during the Middle Ages, in Europe, were the notion of were-wolves and the idea that witches took the forms of cats, bares, or bats. Many are the tales of deadly destruction wrought by fiendish humans who, to sate a gluttony for blood or for revenge, transformed themselves into wolves and performed wolfish deeds. Equally well-known are the tales, not told as mere fiction but held as truth, of the conversion, as by Circe in the Odyssey, of men into beasts, or, as in the Arabian Nights, into stones or other forms of non-human being. A few cases only will be cited here of the persistence of such beliefs among primitive races of the present. Particularly in Africa is this idea widely diffused. The leopard-man is as real to the people of West Africa as was the were-wolf to the European peasant of the fifteenth century. This leopard-man assumes at pleasure the form of the animal from which be takes his name, preying on strangers or on his own people." The Fangs hold that under the magic of an enemy they may be changed into monkeys.[19] In Oceanica Maui transforms an enemy into a dog.[20] Among the Dyaks a man may be suspected of changing himself into a tiger, and is immune to ordinary methods of punishment. Only strong medicine is equal to the task of discipline.[21] In other parts of Malaysia also men transform themselves into tigers or into fishes, and a woman becomes an ape.[22] In India it would seem as if there were hardly any animal shape which may not become the refuge of man or the means of his working evil deeds.[23] In other words, as the gods of Egypt were regarded as abandoning in part their own shape and taking that of animals, birds, or reptiles, so human beings could put on the forms or grades of life of lower animals (as we regard them and primitive peoples did not).[24]
[18. Milligan, Fetish Folk, p. 53; Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 71, 82, 191-195, 247-254, and chap. VII.
19. Milligan, pp.123-I24.
20. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 80.
21. Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 265-278
22. Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 162; Cox, Folk-lore, chap. II.
23 Thurston, Omens and Superstitions, p. 260, et passim.
24 Interesting reading on this whole subject of metamorphosis will be found in Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, chap. IV.]
One may go still farther and find humans transforming themselves into inanimate objects. So the Basques have a story of a witch who determined to drown the crew of a fishing boat, The boat was to meet three waves, the first and second of which the boat might ride, but the third, which would be the witch herself, would overwhelm the boat and its crew. But the cabin boy overheard the plot and the means of foiling it also came to him, so he launched a harpoon into the heart of the third wave, which divided and dashed on the shore, a mass of bloody foam. On the captain's return, he found his wife dying of her wound.[25]
Sometimes, before power can be obtained to effect these transformations, either on self or on another, some magical rite or process must be performed or undergone, or some chance happening must have been encountered. In the Far East a common belief is that an animal that has drunk water which has lain for twenty years in a human skull acquires power to assume the human form at will.[26] This is alleged to have been the case of a vixen
[25. Vinson, Le Folk-lore du Pays Basque, p. 20.
26. C. T. Collyer, in Baltimore Christian Advocate, Oct. 23, 1913.]
in China, who became a woman, the "Cleopatra of the East," and this transformation led to the founding of the first kingdom in Korea.
If the higher ranks of life might be changed into lower grades, the reverse process was equally possible. It is established that in Egypt the practice was prevalent which until recent times was current throughout Africa of sacrificing attendants upon the death of a chief that their souls might serve his in the spirit world. But the softening effects of culture in the Nile land refined away in early historic times this cruel custom. The problem remained--how provide service for the dead nobles and chiefs? The difficulty was surmounted by magic. Images of clay and pottery were created and placed in the tomb, and these, by utterance of the magic formula, were animated in the spirit world as attendants of the deceased. These little figures, called ushabtiu, are found literally by hundreds in the tombs of Egypt. There is reason to believe that the same principle was employed in Korea, Japan, China, and Mongolia. There at the tombs are often found, in clay, wood, and stone, effigies of attendants and of various animals. The most reasonable explanation of these, which is borne out by explanations given to the writer by Koreans, is that these were supposed to be animated in the spirit world to do the will of the deceased nobles or rulers at whose tombs they were placed. Confirmation of this is found in the Nihongi (one of the books of Japan coming nearest in estimation to that we render to our Scriptures), where the book professes to give an account of events occurring 2 B.C.-3 A.D. The story narrates the burial up to the neck of the personal attendants of a deceased brother of the mikado, this being the method of execution in such cases. But the laments of the victims so affected the mikado that when the empress died, clay figures were substituted. The dating of this event is probably wrong, since at the funeral of an empress in 247 A.D., sacrifice of attendants was still in vogue.[27]
[27 Aston, Shinto, pp. 56-58; Underwood, Religions of Eastern Asia, pp. 89-90.]
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