462 Frofpssor James Geonje Frazer [Feb. 5, 



enhance the sacredness of linnian Ufe by deterring the crnel, the 

 passionate, and the mahgnant from the shedding of ])lood, it has 

 operated also indirectly to bring about the same salutary result. 

 For not only does the hag-ridden murderer himself dread his victim's 

 ghost, but the whole community dreads it also and believes itself 

 endangered by the murderer's presence, since the wrathful spirit 

 which pursues him may turn on other people and rend them. Hence 

 society has a strong motive for secluding, banishing, or exterminating 

 the culprit in order to free itself from what it believes to lie an 

 imminent danger, a perilous polhition, a contagion of death. To 

 put it in another way, the community has an interest in punishing 

 homicide. Not that the treatment of homicides by the tribe or state 

 was originally conceived as a punishment inflicted on them : rather 

 it was viewed as a measure of self-defence, a moral quarantine, a 

 process of spiritual purification and disinfection, an exorcism. It 

 was a mode of cleansing the people, and sometimes the homicide 

 himself, from the ghostly infection, the atmosphere of dea'.h, which 

 to the primitive mind appears to be something material and tangible, 

 something that can be literally washed or scoured away by water, 

 pig's blood, sheep's blood, or other detergents. But when the puri- 

 fication took the form o! laying the homicide under restraint, 

 banishing him from the country, or putting him to death in order to 

 appease his victim's ghost, it was for all practical purposes indis- 

 tinguishable from punishment, and the fear of it would act as a 

 deterrent just as surely as if it had been designed to be a punishment 

 and nothing else. When^ a man is about to be hanged it is little 

 consolation to him to be told that hanging is not a punishment but 

 a purification. But the one conception slides easily and almost 

 imperceptibly into the other, so that what was at first a religious rite, 

 a solemn consecration or sacrifice, comes in course of time to be a 

 purely secular function, the penalty which society exacts from those 

 who have injured it : in short, the sacrifice becomes an execution, the 

 priest steps back and the hangman comes forward. Thus, criminal 

 justice was probably based in large measui-e on a crude form of 

 superstition long before the subtle brains of jurists and speculative 

 philosophers deduced it logically, according to their various predilec- 

 tions, from a rigid theory of righteous retribution, a far-sighted 

 policy of making the law a terror to evil-doers, or a benevolent wish 

 to reform the criminal's character and to save his soul in another 

 world by hanging or burning his body in this one. 



If these views are correct, the fear of the ghost has operated in a 

 two-fold way to protect human life. On the one hand, it has made 

 every individual for his own sake more reluctant to slay his fellows, 

 and, on the other hand, it has roused the whole community to punish 

 the slayer. It has placed every man's life in a double ring fence of 

 morality and law. The hot-headed and the cold-hearted have been 

 furnished with a double motive for abstaining from the last fatal step : 



