Chapter XI: The External Soul in Folk-Custom (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§ 3. The External Soul in Animals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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