IMAGES AND NAMES. 129 



One of the best accounts we have of the art of procuring 

 death by sorcery^ is given in Sir James Emerson Tennent's 

 great work on Ceylon. It is not that there is much that is 

 peculiar in the processes it describes, but just the contrary ; its 

 importance lies in its presenting, among a somewhat isolated 

 race, a system of sorcery, which is quite a little museum of the 

 arts practised among the most dissimilar tribes in the remotest 

 regions of the world. The account is as follows : — " The vidahu 

 stated to the magistrate that a general belief existed among 

 the Tamils [of Ceylon] in the fatal effects of a ceremony, per- 

 formed with the skull of a child, with the design of producing 

 the death of an individual against whom the incantation is 

 directed. The skull of a male child, and particularly of a first- 

 born, is preferred, and the efiects are regarded as more certain 

 if it be killed expressly for the occasion ; but for ordinary pur- 

 poses, the head of one who had died a natural death is pre- 

 sumed to be sufficient. The form of the ceremony is to draw 

 certain figures and cabalistic signs upon the skull, after it has 

 been scraped and denuded of the flesh ; adding the name of the 

 individual upon whom the charm is to take efiect. A paste is 

 then prepared, composed of sand from the footprints of the 

 intended victim, and a portion of his hair moistened with his 

 saliva, and this, being spread upon a leaden plate, is taken, 

 together with the skull, to the graveyard of the village, where 

 for forty nights the evil spirits are invoked to destroy the per- 

 son so denounced. The universal belief of the natives is, that 

 as the ceremony proceeds, and the paste dries up on the leaden 

 plate, the sufferer will waste away and decline, and that death, 

 as an inevitable consequence, must follow. ^^ ^ Here we have 

 at once the name, the earth-cutting, the hair and saliva, the 

 cursing, and the drying up. The use of the skull lies in its 

 association with death, and we shall presently find it used in 

 the same way in a very different place. 



Even the spirits of the dead may be acted on through the 

 remains of their bodies. Though the savage commonly holds 

 that after death the soul goes its own way, for the most part 

 independently of the body to which it once belonged, yet in his 



' Tennent, ' Ceylon,' vol. ii. p. 545. 



K 



