§ 131. There is scarcely more than a nominal difference between the facts just grouped under the head of inspira- tion, and the facts to be grouped under the head of divina- tion. The diviner is simply the inspired man using his supernatural power for particular ends.
We noiay again take the ideas of the Amazulu, which have been so carefully ascertained and clearly specified, as typical of the ideas originally framed. Mark, first, that bodily derangement, leading to mental perturbation, is the usual preliminary. Fasting is requisite. They say ''the con- tinually-stuffed body cannot see secret things." Moreover, " a man who is beginning to be an Inyanga * * * docs not IKSPIBATION, DIVINATION^ SXOBCISM^ AND SOBCEBT. 257 sleep^ * * * his sleep is merely by snatches,'^ " lie becomes a house of dreams/' Mark, next, that mental pertur- bation, rising to a certain point, is taken as proof of in- spiration. Where the evidence is not strong, '' some dis- pute and say, ' No. The fellow is merely mad. There is no Itongo [ancestral ghost] in him.' Others say, '0, there is an Itongo in him; he is already an Inyanga.' " And then mark, further, that the alleged possession is proved by his success: doubters say — " We might allow that he is an Inyanga if you had concealed things for him to find^ and he had discovered what you had concealed.^' The conception here so clearly implied is traceable in all cases, if with less clearness, still with sufficient clearness: the chief difference being in the supposed nature of the in- dwelling supernatural agent. Fasting, and such other treatment as produces abnormal excitement, is everywhere a preparation for the diviner's office. Everywhere, too, this excitement is ascribed to the possessing ghost, demon, or divinity; and the words uttered are his. Of the inspired Fijian priest, Williams says: — " All his words and actions are considered as no longer his own, but those ef the deity who has entered into him. * * * While giving the answer, the priest's eyes stand out and roll as in a frenzy; his voice is nnnatnral, his face pale, his lips livid, his breathing depressed, and his entire appearance like that of a furious madman/' And just the same constituents of the belief are shown by the Santals, Starving many days the Santal priest brings on a state of half wildness. He then answers questions through the power of the possessing god. And in the case named by Sherwill, this god was " formerly a chief amongst them.''
The views of the semi-civilized and civilized need mention only to show their kinship. As represented by Homer, '^the gods maintain an intercourse with men as part of the ordinary course of their providence, and this intercourse consists principally in revelations of the divine will, and espes 253 THE DATA OF BOCIOLOQT.
cially of f utare events, made to men by oracular yoices," etc. When reminded of this, we perceive that there is likeness in nature, though some unlikeness in form, between the utterances of the Greek oracle and those of the Zulu Inyanga, to whom the ancestral ghost says — " You will not speak with the people; they will be told by us everything they come to enquire about/^ Along with greater deviation in non-essentials, there have remained the same essentials in the notions entertained throughout Christendom; be- ginning with the ''inspired writers," whose words were supposed to be those of an indwelling holy spirit, and ending with the Pope, who says his infallible divinations have a like origin.
§ 132. Inevitably there comes a further development of these ideas. When the ghost of an enemy has entered a man^s body, can it not be driven out? Can it not be frightened away, or the body be made untenable? Or if this cannot otherwise be done, can it not be done by super- natural aid f If some men are possessed to their hurt by spirits of evil, while others are possessed to their benefit by friendly spirits, as powerful or more powerful, is it not possible by the help of the good spirits to undo the mischief done by the bad ones — ^perhaps to conquer and expel them? This possibilityis reasonably to be inferred. Hence exorcism.
With the belief that derangements of mind and body are caused by indwelling demons, there has everywhere gone the belief that these demons may be ejected; either with, or without, the help of superior demons. The medicine- man of the savage is primarily an exorcist. What Rowlatt tells us of the Mishmis, that, in illness, a priest is sent for to drive away the evil spirit, is told us directly or by impli- cation in hosts of instances. Where a friendly supernatural agent is not invoked to aid, the method is that of making the body of the patient so disagreeable a residence that the demon will not remain in it. In some cases very heroio INSPnUTlON, OITINATIOH, EXOBCISH, AND SORCERY. 259 modes of doing thifl are adopted; as, according to Marsden, by the Samatrans, who, in insanity, attempt to drive away the spirit by putting the insane person into a hat, which they set fire to, leaving him to escape as he best can. Pro- bably varions other extreme measures described, including the swallowing of horrible things, and the making intolerable smells, have the purpose of disgusting the intrader. Generally, also, the exorcist tries to alarm the mischievous tenant by shouts, and gesticulations, and fearful faces. Among the Calif omian tribes, the doctor " squats down opposite the patient and barks at him after the manner of an enraged cur, for hours together''; and a Koniaga- doctor has a female assistant who does the groaning and growling. Sometimes with other means is joined physical force. Among the Okanagans, the medicine-man ''pro- ceeds to force the evil spirit from the sick man by pressing both clenched fists with all his might in the pit of his stomach/' As a type of such processes may be taken that ascribed by Herrera to the Indians of Cumana: — " If the disease increaBed, they said the patient was possessed with spirits, stroked all the body over, used words of enchantment, licked some joints, and sncked, saying they drew ont spirits; took a twig of a oertain tree, the virtue whereof none but the physician knew, tickled their own throats with it, till they vomited and bled, sighed, roared, qoaked, stamped, made a thousand faces, sweated for two hours, and at last brought up a sort of thick phlegm, with a little, hard, black ball in the middle of it, which those that belonged to the sick person carried into the field, saying — ' Go thy way, Devil.'" But in what we may consider the more-developed form of exorcism, one demon is employed to drive out another. The medicine-man or priest conquers the demon in the patient by the help of a demon with which he is himself possessed, or else he summons a friendly supernatural power to his aid.
Everyone knows that, in this last form, exorcism con- tinues during civilization. In their earlier days the Hebrews employed some physical process, akin to the processes we find among savages; such as making a 260 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOQT.
dreadful Btench by burning the heart and liver of a fish: by such exorcism, taught by the angel Baphael, the demon Asmodeus was driven out — fled to Egypt when he ^' had smelled " the smoke. But later, as in the exor- cisms of Christ, the physical process was replaced by the compulsion of superior supernatural agency. In this form exorcism still exists in the Koman Catholic Church, which has specially-ordained exorcists; and it was daily practised in the Church of England down to 1550, when infants were exorcized before baptism, in the words — "I command thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, that thou come out, and depart from these infants.^' Occasional exorcism continued till 1665, if not later: a clergyman named Ruddle, licensed to exorcize by the Bishop of Exeter, having then, according to his own account, succeeded in laying the ghost of a woman, by the use of the nieans appointed for dealing with demons — ^magic circle, '' pentacle,'' etc.* Nor is this aU. It has been an ecclesiastical usage, lasting down to Pro- testant times, to exorcize the water used in divine service: a practice implying the primitive notion that invisible demons swarm everywhere around.
In this, as in other cases, we may still trace the original nature of the supernatural agent. Malicious ghosts which annoy the living because their bodies have been ill-treated, differ but little from evil spirits which vex the living by possessing them. The instance given above, clearly implies that the laying of ghosts and the exorcism of demons, are but modifications of the same thing. The Amazulu show us the two in undistinguished forms. Concerning a woman pei*secuted by the ghost of her dead husband. Canon Calla- way tells us: — " If it trouble her when she has gone to another man without being as yet married; if she has left her husband's children behind, the dead * See Qlimptet of the Supernatural, vol. L» pp. 59-69.
IN8PIRATI0K, DIVINATTON, EXORCISM, AND SOBCBBY. 261 husbifnd follows her and asks, ' With whom have you left my children? What are yoa going to do here? Go back to my children. If you do not assent I will kill you.' The spirit is at once laid in that village because it harasses the woman."
Of coarse, as civilization adyances, the ideas and processes differentiate; so that while evil spirits, distinctly classed as enemies, are commanded or conjured, ghosts, regarded as less mischievous, are pacified by fulfilling their requests. But since the meanings of ghost, spirit, demon, devil, angel, were originally the same, we may fairly infer that what eventually became the casting out of a devil, was originally an expulsion of the malicious double of a dead man.
§ 133. Power over spirits supposed to be attained by the exorcist, grows into power used for other purposes. A medicine-man who, helped by friendly ghosts, expels the ghosts of enemies, naturally asks himself whether he may not get ghostly aid for other purposes. Can he not by such aid revenge himself on enemies, or achieve ends not else possible? The belief that he can initiates sorcery.
A primitive form of this belief is shown us by the Kaffirs, who think " dead bodies are restored to life by bad persons, and made hobgoblins to aid them in mischief." Here we have direct identification of the familiar demon with the deceased man. When we read in Ellis's Polynesia the belief of the Tahitians, that sickness and death are produced by the incantations of priests, who induce the evil spirits to enter the sick; or when we read that most misfortunes are attributed by the Australians to the power which hostile tribes possess over the spirits and demons which infest every comer of the land; we recognize the same notion less specifically stated. In the fact that by Jewish writers '' a necromancer is defined as one who fasts and lodges at night amongst tombs, in order that the evil spirit may come upon him; " we have a hint of a kindred belief in an early historic race. And we recognize the connection between 262 THE DATA OF BOniOLOGT.
these original forms of tlie conception and tlie derived forma that have survived among the more civilized.
The operations of the sorcerer, having for their primary end the gaining of power over a living person, and having for their secondary end (which eventually becomes pre- dominant) the gaining of power over the souls of dead persons, or supernatural agents otherwise conceived, are guided by a notion which it will be instructive to consider.
Already, in § 52, it has been pointed out that before analysis has progressed somewhat, the special power or peculiar property of an object, is supposed to be present in all its parts, and to be obtained by obtaining any of its parts. This mode of thinking, we saw, led to actions which I must here re-illustrate. As further showing the idea that the qualities of any individual are appropriated by eating him, I may give the statement of Stanbridge, that when the Australians kill an infant, they feed a previonsly-bom child with it; believing '* that by its eating as much as possible of the roasted infant, it will possess the strength of both.'* And I may add testimonies to the still more remark- able &ct, that elsewhere, dead relatives are consumed in pursuance of an allied belief. Grarcilasso says of the Cucamas that ''as soon as a relation died, these people assembled and ate him roasted or boiled, according as he was thin or fat.^' Wallace tells us that certain adjacent races, the Tari^nas and Tuo&nos, who drink the ashes of their relatives, " believe that thus the virtues of the deceased will be transmitted to the drinkers;" and of another allied race, the Arawaks, we are told by Waitz that it was " the highest mark of honour they could pay to the dead, to drink their powdered bones mixed in water,^' Equally significant is a custom of the whale-fiishing Koniagas. ''When a whaler dies, the body is cut into small pieces and dis- tributed among his fellow-craftsmen, each of whom, after rubbing the point of his lance upon it, dries and preserves hia piece as a sort of talisman. Or the body is placed in a tKSPIBATION, DIVINATION^ EXOBCISM^ AND SOBCEBT, 263 distant cave^ wliere^ before setting out upon a chase^ tlie whalers all congregate^ take it out, cany it to a stream, im- merse it, and then drink of the water/' Moreover, the particular virtue possessed by an aggregate is not only supposed to inhere in all parts of it, but extends to whatever is associated with it. Even its appearance is regarded as a property which cannot exist apart from its other properties. Hence the dislike often shown by savages to having their portraits taken. Along with this lively representation they think there must go some part of the life. A belief like that of the Chinooks who, if photographed, '^ fancied that their spirit thus passed into the keeping of others, who could torment it at pleasure,^' or like that of the Mapuch^s, who hold that possession of a portrait gives fatal power over the person represented, will be fully ex- emplified hereafter, under another head. For the pre- sent, it suffices to name this belief, as further showing the ways in which unanalytical conceptions of things work out. One more way must be added. Not only with the portrait, but even with the name, there is this association. The belief betrayed by our own uncultured that some intrinsic connection exists between word and thing (a belief which even the cultured among the Greeks did not get rid of) is shown us still more distinctly by savages. From all parts of the world we get illustrations of the desire to keep a name secret. Burton remarks of the North American Indian generally, that he dislikes to disclose his name; and of South Americans, Smith tells us that the Mapuchd shows this same repugnance, under the belief that knowledge of his name gives a fatal power over him. The motive for this secrecy was clearly expressed by the Chinook who thought Kane's desire to know his name proceeded from a wish to steal it. Indeed, as Bancroft puts it, " with them the name assumes a personality; it is the shadow or spirit, or other-self, of the flesh and blood person.'' A kindred interpretation is shown among the Land-Dyaks, who 264 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOGY.
often change the names of their children^ especially if they are sickly: " there being an idea that they will deceire the inimical spirits by following this practice/' And in another direction this belief works out in the widely-prevalent repugnance td name the dead. That which Dove tells us of the Tasmanians, that they fear " pronouncing the name by which a deceased friend was knoWn, as if his shade might thus be offended/' is told us, with or without the assigned motive, by travellers from many regions.
The facts thus grouped make sufficiently clear the genesis of the sorcerer's beliefs and practices. Everywhere he pro- ceeds by obtaining a part of his victim's body or some- thing closely associated with his body, or else by making some representation of him; and then Jie does to this part, or this representation, something which he thinks is thereby done to his victim. The conception ascribed by Fitzroy to the Patagonians, who think that possession of a man's hair or nails enables the ntiagician to work evil on him, is the general conception. New Zealanders ** all dread cutting their nails " for this reason. Canon Callaway specifically states of the Amazulu, that ^'sorcerers are supposed to destroy their victims by taking some portion of their bodies, as hair or nails; or something that has been worn next their person, as a piece of old garment, and adding to it certain medicines, which is then buried in some secret place." Ancient Peruvian sorcerers destroyed their victims by acting on blood taken from them. Among the New Caledonians, this fatal power over any one is exercised by operating on the remnants of his meals. Probably the idea is that these remnants continue to be connected with the portions he has eaten, and that have become part of him. They believe that — " men can create disease and death hj burning what is called Nahak, Nahak means rubbish, but principallj refuse of food. Everything of the kind they bury or throw into the sea, lest the disease-makers should get hold of it. * * * The belief in the system of Nahak-buming was as firm in the craft as oat of it If a disease-maker was HI himself, he felt eure that some one must be burning his Nahak.'^ Spells which originate in the belief that a representation is physically connected with the thing represented, might be exemplified from societies in all grades. Keating tells ns of the Chippewas, that a sorcerer transfers a disease by making a '^ wooden image of his patient^s enemy,'* piercing it to the heart, and introducing powders; and the identity of this method with methods indicated in tales of Eoropean witchcraft, needs no proof.
Turning from this simpler form of magic to the form in which supernatural agents are employed, there come the interesting questions — What connection is there be- tween the two? And does not the second grow out of the first? Reasons exist for thinking that it does. On remembering how small a difference the primitive man recognizes between the living and the dead, we may sus- pect that he thinks the two may be similarly acted upon. If possessing a portion of a living man gives power o^er him, will not possessing a portion of a dead man give power over him too? That by some peoples the deceased is supposed to have need of all lus parts, has already been shown. We saw, in § 88, that the Mexicans took care to leave his bones where he could easily find them at the resurrection; and that with the same notion a dead Peruvian's hair and nails were preserved for him in one place. According to Bastian, the like recurs, with the like assigned reason, among the Inland Negroes in Ardrah. Is there not, then, the implication that one who gets possession of such relics thereby gets power over the dead owner, as he would have done over the owner if living? Accept this implication, and the meaning of enchantments becomes clear. Habitually fire is used; and habitually the things burned or boiled are fragments of dead things, brute or human, but especially human. Speaking of Ancient Peruvians, Arriaga says that by "a, certain powder ground from the bones of the dead,^^ a sorcerer ''stupefies all in the house." In early times it was thought dangerous "to leave corpses unguarded, lest they should be mangled by the witches, who took from them the most choice ingredients com- posing their charms/' Portions of the dead man having been the elements originally used, and such portions having repulsiveness as their most conspicuous trait, repulsive things in general naturally suggested themselves as things likely to strengthen the '' hell-broth/' Setting out with coercion of the dead man by the help of some- thing belonging to him, we may see that along with the differentiation of ghosts into orders of spirits and demons, there would be certain to go differentiation of the spells and incantations. Especially if animal-souls, or the souls of metamorphosed human beings, were to be conjured, there might be looked for those strange mixtures of " eye of newt, and toe of frog,'* etc., which the witch-cauldron contains.* That some such relationship exists between the arts of the necromancer and these ideas of the savage, we find further reason to suspect in the supposed * While the above passage if standing in tj^, there comes to me a striking verification of the inference drawn in it. In a letter of thanks to Mr. Bancroft^ for the first volume of his Native Raoea of the Padfie 8t(xtet, having implied that I greatly valued, for my own purposes, his laborious compilation, Mr. Ban- croft was so obliging as to send me forthwith the pi^oofs of large parts of the remaining volumes. In those of Vol. III., a paragraph on p. 147 describes the initiation of a shamin among the Thlinkeets. Going to the woods, and feed- ing for some weeks " only on the roots of the patMx-karridmn," he waits till " the chief of the spirits " [who is an ancestral sham&n] sends him " a river- otter, in the tongue of which animal is supposed to be hid the whole power and secret of shamdnism." • • • « If, however, the spirits wiU not visit the would- be shamin, nor give him any opportunity to get the otter-tongue as described above, the neophyte visits the tomb of a dead shamAn and keeps an awful vigil over night, holding in his living mouth a finger of the dead man or one of his teeth; this constrains the spirits veiy powerfully to send the necessary otter."
Here, more fitly than elsewhere, I may point out that we thus get an explanation of amulets. Portions of dead men and dead animals, though not exclusively the things used as charms, are the usual things. In pursuance of the notion above described, they are supposed to give the possessor some powev potency of names. The primitiye notion that a name has intrinsic yirtue^ and the derivative notion that calling the dead by their names affects them^ and may offend them^ originate the necromancer's notion of invocation. Every- where, be it in the Hebrew legend of Samnel, whose ghost asks why he has been disquieted, or in an Icelandic saga, which describes ghosts severally summoned by name as answering to the summons, we get evidence that posses- sion of the name is supposed to give over the dead an influence like that which it is supposed to give over the living. The power acquired by knowledge of the name is again impUed by such stories as the '' open Sesame '' of the Arabian Nights; and the alleged effect of calling the name we see in the still-extant, though now jocose, saying— '' Talk of the devil and he is sure to appear/' Special interpretations aside, however, the general inter- pretation is sufficiently manifest. The primitive ghost- that belonged to the dead being, or some power over it» or both. That which the sorcerer employs as an instrument of coercion, is, when a talisman, held as securing the good offices of the ghost, or as a protection against it. The custom, common to many savage races, of wearing about them bones of dead relatives, has probably this meaning; which, us we saw, was the avowed meaning of the Koniaga- whalers in keeping as charms bits of the flesh of a dead companion. This notion is clearly implied in the fadt told us by Beecham, that " an Ashantee sovereign carried the head of his predecessor with him to battle as a charm; " and the New Caledonians, who " preserve the nails and teeth of the dead aa charms," show us the same notion. Races who are in danger from ferocious animals frequently use as amulets the preservable parts of such animals. Of the Damaras, Anderson says **that their amulets are generally" the teeth of lions and hyenas, entrails of animals, etc., etc.; and elsewhere he describes the Namaqua-amulets as consisting " as usual of the teeth and claws of lions, hyienas, and other wild boasts; pieces of wood, bone, dried flesh and fat, roots of plants, etc" Similarly Boyle gives as follows the charms belonging to a Dyak medicine-man: — Some teeth of alligators and honey bears, several boar's tusks, chips of deer horn, tangles of coloured thread, daws of some animals, and odds and ends of European articles. Evidently the preservable parts of animals take the leading place. Elsewhere the motive is specified. Enumerating tho amulets of the Brazilian Indian, Spix and Martins name the "eye-teeth of ounces and monkeys;" and they say the Indian thinks hb amulets, among other benefits, " will protect him against the attacks of wild beasts."
268 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOGYtheory, implying but little difference between dead and living, fosters the notion that the dead can be acted upon by arts like those which act on the living; and hence results that species of magic which, in its earlier form, is a sum- moning of the dead to get from them information, as the witch of Endor summons the spirit of Samuel, and in its later form is a raising of demons to help in mischief.
§ 134. Exorcism and sorcery pass insensibly into miracle. What difference exists refers less to the natures of the effects worked than to the characters of the agents working them. If the marvellous results are ascribed to a super- natural being at enmity with the observers, the art is sorcery; but if ascribed to a friendly supernatural being, the marvellous results are classed as miracles.
That this is the relation between the two, is shown in the contest between the Hebrew priests and the magicians of Egypt. From PharaoVs point of view, Aaron was an enchanter working by the help of a spirit antagonistic to himself; while his own priests worked by the help of his favouring gods. Contrariwise, from the point of view of the Israelites, the achievements of their own leaders were divine, and those of their Antagonists diabolical. But there was agreement in the beliefs that supernatural agency was employed, and that the more powerful supernatural agent had to be yielded to.
Alleged ancient miracles of another order are paralleled in their meanings by alleged miracles now wrought every day in South Africa. By the Bechuanas, missionaries are taken for another sort of rain-makers; and among the Torubans, " an old farmer, seeing a cloud, will say to a mis- sionary, ' please let it rain for us.' " Rain being thus, in these arid regions, synonymous with blessing, we find con- tests between rain-doctors, or '^ heaven-herds,^' like that between Elijah and the priests of Baal. There are similar trials of strength, and kindred penalties for failure. At a INSPIRATION, DlVmATION, EXOECISM, AND SORCERY. 269 time when ''the heaven was hot and dry a rain-doctor, XJmkqaekana, says — ' let the people look at the heaven at such a time; it will rain/ * * * And when it rained, the people said — ' truly, he is a doctor/ * * * After that year the heaven was hard, and it did not rain. The people per- secuted him exceedingly. * * * It is said they poisoned him.'^ Habitually we find this same conception of the weather-doctor, as, in the words of Canon Callaway, '' a priest to whom is entrusted the power of prevailing media- tion''; and habitually we find both his mediatory power and the power of the supernatural agent with whom he has influence, tested by the result. Thus in the account of his captivity among the Brazilian Indians, the old voyager, Hans Stade, saying, "God did a wonder through me," narrates how, at the request of two savages, he stopped by prayer a coming storm which threatened to hinder their fishing; and that " the savage Parwaa said — ' Now I see that thou hafit spoken with thy god:''' pagan and Christian being thus perfectly at one in their interpretation.