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Cable), and even to offer blood-sacrifices of cocks, goats, 

 or children, to propitiate the evil one. Sometimes the evil 

 one is present in the person of ;i harmless serpent, as in 

 West Africa and in Haiti, where a large native snake 

 takes the place of the African reptile. Among other 

 people, as in Jamaica and the United States, the pro- 

 pitiation of the snake, as such, has been abandoned, but 

 all of the reptilian tribe is shunned with horror and 

 regarded as influential for evil (powerful obi). Even in 

 Louisiana snakes are said to enter still into the cere- 

 monials of obiism. 



The trances into which our negroes fall at their religious 

 revivals are undoubtedly survivals of these rites. These 

 meetings have practically been abandoned by the blacks 

 wherever white churches have been instituted, except 

 possibly in Haiti and Jamaica, and even there they are 

 infrequent. 



A remarkable fact concerning these rites is that descrip- 

 tions of them are based on hearsay, the narrators always 

 asserting that it is impossible to ascertain anything au- 

 thentic respecting them, owing to the secrecy with which 

 they are carried on. This fact adds to the suspicion that 

 even the African devils are painted blacker than they 

 really are, and that many of their alleged doings have 

 taken place only in the imagination of the narrator. 



Such is the worst obiism of the West Indian blacks, 

 which may survive only in Haiti, if even there ; which, in 

 a modified form, can be found evervwhere in our own 

 country; and which is in no manner markedly different 

 from the tales of witchcraft which one cannot escape if he 

 visits Salem, Massachusetts. 



There can be no doubt that the African obiism sur- 

 vives in some form wherever the African race is extant, 

 just as the Germans and English believe in elfs, gnomes, 

 and fairies; and in a degree it is practised in America 

 from Boston to the equator. Taverner, writing in the 

 Boston "Post" of February 1, 1883, describes a negress 



