830 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



little figures representing persons whose lives they wished to cur- 

 tail, and stabbed them in the place of the heart. A custom still 

 exists in Borneo of making a figure in wax of an enemy whom 

 one desires to bewitch and melting it before the fire. They say 

 that the person designated will waste away as his image disap- 

 pears. Peruvian sorcerers proceed in the same way, except that 

 their figures are made of rags. In the East Indies, according to 

 Dubois, they knead with hair or bits of skin, earth collected in 

 some muddy place, of which they make a figure, on the breast of 

 which they write the name of an enemy ; then stab the figure 

 with needles, or otherwise mutilate it always in the belief that 

 similar injuries will be inflicted upon the person represented. 



Vestiges of this primitive superstition are furthermore found 

 among civilized peoples ; for, as Grimm relates, Jews were accused, 

 in the eleventh century, in Europe, of having slain Bishop Eber- 

 gard by the aid of witchcraft of this kind. These Jews had each 

 a figure of wax representing the bishop, had bribed a priest to 

 baptize it, and had then thrown it in the fire. The wax had 

 hardly melted when the bishop was struck with mortal illness. 



The famous adventurer Jacob, chief of the Pastoureaux, who 

 lived in the thirteenth century, believed seriously, as he says in 

 his Demonology, that the devil taught men the art of making 

 images of wax and clay, the destruction of which involved the 

 death of the persons whom they represented. In the time of 

 Catherine de Medicis it was a custom to make such figurines of 

 wax and to melt them over a slow fire, or stab them with needles, 

 in order to make their enemies suffer. The operation was called 

 envoutement (or spell-binding). 



We shall not be done unless we cite all the facts that prove 

 that in the mind of the primitive man it is enough to possess 

 any object a piece of a coat, hair, a bit of a nail that has be- 

 longed to a person to have power to act on him and do him harm. 

 Faith in the efficiency of this means is so strong among backward 

 peoples that persons who have any reason to suspect others hide 

 their clothes in order that no part of them may be stolen. Others, 

 when they cut their hair or nails, put the cut parts on the roof of 

 their house or bury them. So peasants in some countries do with 

 extracted teeth. We add, to complete our picture, that writing is 

 regarded by the savage as endowed with the same magic force as 

 drawing a fact we may easily comprehend if we recollect that 

 picture-writing preceded writing with letters or any conventional 

 signs, and is still practiced among some savage tribes. In these 

 picture-writings the subjection of a man or an animal to bad luck 

 is indicated by an arrow drawn from the mouth to the heart. A 

 sign of that kind is supposed to be equivalent to a real taking 

 possession of the animal or the person represented. 



