136 IMAGES AND NAMES. 



dark corner there arose an old woman, naked, covered witli dust 

 and ashes, a miserable picture of hunger and wi'etcliedness ; it 

 was the slave of my hosts, a captive taken from another tribe. 

 She crept cautiously to the hearth and blew up the fire, brought 

 out some herbs and bits of human hair, murmured some- 

 thing in an earnest tone, and grinned and gesticulated strangely 

 towards the children of her masters. She scratched a skull, 

 thi'ew herbs and hair rolled into balls into the fire, and so on. 

 For a long while I could not conceive what all this meant, till 

 at last springing from my hammock and coming close to her, I 

 saw by her teri'or and the imploring gesture she made to me 

 not to betray her, that she was practising magic arts to destroy 

 the children of her enemies and oppressors." " This," he 

 continues, "was not the first example of sorcery I had met with 

 among the Indians. When I considered what delusions and 

 darkness must have been working in the human mind before 

 man could come to fear and invoke dark unknown powers for 

 another's hurt, — when I considered that so complex a super- 

 stition was but the remnant of an originally pure worship of 

 nature, and what a chain of complications must have preceded 

 such a degradation," etc. etc.^ 



I cannot but think that Dr. Martius's deduction is the abso- 

 lute reverse of the truth. Looking at the practices of sorcery 

 among the lower races as a whole, they have not the appear- 

 ance of mutilated and misunderstood fragments of a higher 

 system of belief and knowledge. Among savage tribes we 

 find families of customs and superstitions in great part trace- 

 able to the same principle, the confusion of imagination and 

 reahty, of subjective and objective, of the mind and the outer 

 world. Among the higher races we find indeed many of the 

 same customs, but they are scattered, practised by the vulgar 

 with little notion of their meaning, looked down upon with 

 contempt by the more instructed, or explained as mystic sym- 

 bohsms, and at last dropped off one by one as the world grows 

 wiser. There is a curious handful of plain savage superstitions 

 among the rules to which the Roman Flamen Dialis had to 



' Dr. T. Martius, ' Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Amerikanischen Mensch- 

 heit;' 1839. 



