July 11, 1884.] 



♦ KNO\VLEDGE 



23 



things than namea The savage who is afraid to utter 

 these, shrinks from having his likeness taken, in the feel- 

 ing that some part of him is transferred, and at the mercy 

 of the sorcerer and enemy. The Malemutes of North 

 America refu.«ed to risk their lives before a jihotographic 

 apparatus. They ^•aid that those who liad their likenesses, 

 had their spirit, and they would not let these pass into 

 the keeping of those who niiglit use them as instruments 

 of torment. The Yanktons accused Catlin of causing a 

 scarcity of buffaloes by putting a great many of them in 

 his book, and refused to let him take their 

 portraits. So with the Araucaniaiis, who ran away 

 if any attempt was made to sketch them. Among 

 such races, we find great care exercised lest 

 cuttings of hair, pnrings of nails, saliva, refuse 

 of food, water in which they had washed, Ac, should fall 

 into unfriendly or mistrusted hands. The South Sea 

 Island chiefs had servants following them with spittoons, 

 that the saliva might be buried iu some hidden place. 

 Among the Polynesians any one who fell ill attributed it 

 to some sorcerer, who had got hold of refuse from the sick 

 and was burning it, and the quiet of the night was often 

 broken by the blowing of shi'll-trumpets, as signals for the 

 sorcerer to stop until the gifts on their way to appease him 

 could arrive. As with the name or the portrait, whoever 

 possessed a part of the material substance possessed a part 

 of the spiritual, and in this world-wide belief in a sympa 

 thetic connection between things living and not livinglies the 

 whole philosophy of sorcery, of charms, amulets, spells, and 

 the general doctrine of luck surviving through the succes- 

 sive stages of culture to this day. And he who wonld prevent 

 anything from his person getting into hostile hands, naturally 

 sought after things in which coveted qualities were believed 

 to dwell, and avoided those of a reverse nature. So we find 

 tiger's llesh eaten to give courage, and the eves of owls 

 swallowed to give good sight in the dark. The Kaffirs 

 prepare a powder made of the dried flesh of various wild 

 beasts, the leopard, tiger, elephant, snake, etc., so as to 

 absorb the several virtues of these creatures. The Tyrolese 

 hunter wears his tuft of eagle's down to gain long sight and 

 daring, and the Red Indian strings bears' claws round his 

 neck to get Bruin's savage courage. The customs of scalping 

 and, in some measure, of cannibalism, may be referred to the 

 same notion, for the Red man will risk his life to prevent a 

 tribesman's scalp being captured by the foe, and the New 

 Zealander will swallow the eyes of his slain enem v to improve 

 his sight. When a whaler died, the Eskimos distributed 

 portions of his dried body among his friends, and rubbed 

 the points of their lances with them, it being held that a 

 weapon thus charmed would pierce a vital part in a whale, 

 where another would fail. Sometimes the body was laid 

 in a cave, and, before starting for the chase, the whalers 

 would assemble, and, carrying it to a stream, plunge it in, 

 and then drink the water. When the heroic Jesuit, 

 Br^beuf, was tortured by the Iroquois, they were so 

 astonished at his endurance, that they laid open his breast 

 and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant a 

 foe, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage. 

 A chief tore out his heart and devoured it. 



Cannibalism, it may be remarked, en passant, is also 

 found to have a religious significance, on the supposition, 

 which has unsuspected survival among advanced races, 

 that eating the body and drinking the blood communicates 

 the spirit of the victim to the consumer. It is not always 

 the most savage races who practise it ; for example, thei 

 Australians, despite the scarcity of large animals for food: 

 supply, rarely eat the flesh of man, whilst the Newi 

 Zealanders, who rank far above them, and had not the like: 

 excuse, were systematic feeders, op human flesh. :. . .. ! 



As examples of a reverse kind, but witnessing to the 

 play of like beliefs in qualities passing from brutes and 

 lifeless things, we finrl some races avoiding oil, lest the game 

 slip thriiUgh their fingers, and abstaining from the flesh of 

 deer, lest it engenders timidity, and of pigs and of tortoises, 

 lest the eater has very small eyes. Dr. Tylor gives an 

 a|iposite illustration of a kindred superstition in the He.ssian 

 lad who thinks that he may escajie the conscription by carry- 

 ing a baby-gii I's cap in his pocket, as a symbolical way of re- 

 pudiating manhood. Among ourselves there was an old 

 medical saw, "Hare-flesh engendereth melancholy bloude," 

 and in Swift's " Polite Conversation " we have this reason 

 assigned by Lady Answerall when asked to eat it ; whilst 

 faith is not yet extinct in the " Doctrine of Signatures," or 

 the notion that the appearance of a plant indicates the 

 disease for which it is a remedy, as the " eyebright," the 

 black-purple spot on the corolla of which was said to show 

 that it was good for weak eyes. 



Ihand remarks* that the custom of giving infants coral 

 to help in cutting the teeth, is said to be a survival of an 

 old belief in it as an amulet ; and in English, Sicilian, and 

 We.-t Indian folk-lore, we find the belief that it changes 

 colour in sympathy with the pale or healthy look of the 

 wearer. An old Latin author says : " It putteth of lighte- 

 nynge, whirlewynde, tempeste, and stormes fro shyppes and 

 houses that it is in." 



W^e are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old, 

 and although our customs and beliefs have a far less 

 venerable antiquity, their sources lie not less in primitive 

 thought. Like the survival of the " casula " or " little 

 house " or " .'jhelter " in the chasuble of the priest ; like the 

 use of stone knives in circumcision long after the discovery 

 of metals ; the general tends to become special ; the com- 

 mon, its primitive need or service forgotten, to become 

 sacred. Sumetimes the early idea abides ; the Crees, who 

 carry about the bones of the dead carefully wrapped u]> 

 as a fetish ; the Caribs, who think such relics can aaswer 

 questions ; the Xomanes, who drink the powdered bones in 

 water, that they may receive the spirit ; the Iroquois 

 cited above ; represent the barbarous ancestry of higher 

 races, whether of the Bacchanalians described by 

 Arnobius, who thought that the fulness ,of the 

 divine majesty was imparted to them when they 

 tore and ate the struggling rams with mouths dripping 

 with gore, or of the faithful who receive nutriment thrc iigh 

 the symbols of the Cross. And the prayers of savage and 

 civilised have this in common, that some advantage is 

 thereby sought by the utterer ; their sacrifices are alike 

 the giving up of one's goods or one's self to a deity who 

 may be appeased or bribed thereby ; their fastings are 

 cultivated as inducing the abnormal states in which their 

 old men dream dreams and their young men see visions, 

 spirits appearing as angels ascending and descending 

 between earth and the abode of the blest ; their baptisms 

 are the ancient lustrations, which water, as the cleansing 

 element, suggested ; and their eastward position, over 

 which jurists and ecclesiastics have fought, the undoubted 

 relic of worship of the rising sun. 



In short, there is no rite or ceremony yet practised and 

 revered amongst us which is not the lineal descendant of 

 barbaric thought and usage, expressing a need which, were 

 men less the slaves of creation and indolence, would long 

 since have found loftier form than in genuflexion before 

 shrine and reliquary. By an exercise of imagination not 

 possible but for these being a felicitous " gesture language '' 

 of the cries of human souls, a mass of heathen and' pagan 

 rites have been transformed into those of the Christian 



i.:>*:>v,.' *"Pop. Ant.," II., 86. 



'•• 4}>*fif"'^ 



