James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 07 of 12)

Use of the winnowing-fan to avert evil from children in India, Madagascar, and China. Karen ceremony of fanning away evils from children.

A like intention of averting evil in some shape from a child is assigned in other cases of the same custom. Thus in Travancore, “if an infant is observed to distort its limbs as if in pain, it is supposed to be under the pressure of some one who has stooped over it, to relieve which the mother places it with a nut-cracker on a winnowing fan and shakes it three or four times.” 35 35 S. Mateer, Native Life in Travancore (London, 1883), p. 213. Again, among the Tanala people of Madagascar almost all children born in the unlucky month of Faosa are buried alive in the forest. But if the parents resolve to let the child live, they must call in the aid of a diviner, who performs a ceremony for averting the threatened ill-luck. The child is placed in a winnowing-fan along with certain herbs. Further, the diviner takes herbs of the same sort, a worn-out spade, and an axe, fastens them to the father's spear, and sets the spear up in the ground. Then the child is bathed in water which has been medicated with some of the same herbs. Finally the diviner says: “The worn-out spade to the grandchild; may it (the child) not despoil its father, may it not despoil its mother, may it not despoil the children; let it be good.” This ceremony, we are told, “puts an end to the child's evil days, and the father gets the spear to put away all evil. The child then joins its father and mother; its evil days are averted, and the water and the other things are buried, for they account them evil.” 36 36 J. Richardson, “Tanala Customs, Superstitions, and Beliefs,” Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, Reprint of the First Four Numbers (Antananarivo, 1885), pp. 226 sq. Similarly the ancient Greeks used to bury, or throw into the sea, or deposit at cross-roads, the things that had been used in ceremonies of purification, no doubt because the things were supposed to be tainted by the evil which had been transferred to them in the rites. 37 37 Pausanias, ii. 31. 8; K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der gottesdienstlichen Alterthümer der Griechen 2 (Heidelberg, 1858), pp. 132 sq. , § 23, 25. Another example of the use of a winnowing-fan in what may be called a purificatory ceremony is furnished by the practice of the Chinese of Foo-Chow. A lad who is suffering from small-pox is made to squat in a large winnowing sieve. On his head is placed a piece of red cloth, and on the cloth are laid some parched beans, which are then allowed to roll off. As the name for beans, pronounced in the local dialect, is identical with the common name for small-pox, and as moreover the scars left by the pustules are thought to resemble beans, it appears to be imagined that just as the beans roll off the boy's head, so will the pustules vanish from his body without leaving a trace behind. 38 38 Rev. J. Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese , edited and revised by the Rev. Paxton Hood (London, 1868), pp. 114 sq. The beans used in the ceremony had previously been placed before an image of the goddess of small-pox. Thus the cure depends on the principle of homoeopathic magic. Perhaps on the same principle a winnowing-fan is employed in the ceremony from a notion that it will help to waft or fan away the disease like chaff from the grain. We may compare a purificatory ceremony observed by the Karens of Burma at the naming of a new-born child. Amongst these people “children are supposed to come into the world defiled, and unless that defilement is removed, they will be unfortunate, and unsuccessful in their undertakings. An Elder takes a thin splint of bamboo, and, tying a noose at one end, he fans it down the child's arm, saying:

“The Elder now changes his motion and fans up the child's arm, saying:

Among the reasons for the use of the winnowing-fan in birth-rites may have been the wish to avert evils and to promote fertility and growth.

Thus in some of the foregoing instances the employment of the winnowing-fan may have been suggested by the proper use of the implement as a means of separating the corn from the chaff, the same operation being extended by analogy to rid men of evils of various sorts which would otherwise adhere to them like husks to the grain. It was in this way that the ancients explained the use of the winnowing-fan in the mysteries. 40 40 Servius on Virgil, Georg. i. 166: “ Et vannus Iacchi… Mystica autem Bacchi ideo ait, quod Liberi patris sacra ad purgationem animae pertinebant: et sic homines ejus mysteriis purgabantur, sicut vannis frumenta purgantur. ” But one motive, and perhaps the original one, for setting a newborn child in a winnowing-fan and surrounding it with corn was probably the wish to communicate to the infant, on the principle of sympathetic magic, the fertility and especially the power of growth possessed by the grain. This was in substance the explanation which W. Mannhardt gave of the custom. 41 41 W. Mannhardt, “Kind und Korn,” Mythologische Forschungen (Strasburg, 1884), pp. 351-374. He rightly insisted on the analogy which many peoples, and in particular the ancient Greeks, have traced between the sowing of seed and the begetting of children, 42 42 W. Mannhardt, op. cit. pp. 351 sqq. and he confirmed his view of the function of the winnowing-fan in these ceremonies by aptly comparing a German custom of sowing barley or flax seed over weakly and stunted children in the belief that this will make them grow with the growth of the barley or the flax. 43 43 W. Mannhardt, op. cit. p. 372, citing A. Wuttke, Der deutsche Volks-aberglaube 2 (Berlin, 1869), p. 339, § 543; L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg (Oldenburg, 1867), i. 81. An Esthonian mode of accomplishing the same object is to set the child in the middle of a plot of ground where a sower is sowing hemp and to leave the little one there till the sowing is finished; after that they imagine that the child will shoot up in stature like the hemp which has just been sown. 44 44 Boecler-Kreutzwald, Der Ehsten abergläubische Gebräuche (St. Petersburg, 1854), p. 61. This custom is also cited by Mannhardt ( l. c. ).

Use of the winnowing-fan in the rites of Dionysus.

With the foregoing evidence before us of a widespread custom of placing newborn children in winnowing-fans we clearly cannot argue that Dionysus must necessarily have been a god of the corn because Greek tradition and Greek art represent him as an infant cradled in a winnowing-fan. The argument would prove too much, for it would apply equally to all the infants that have been so cradled in all parts of the world. We cannot even press the argument drawn from the surname “He of the Winnowing-fan” which was borne by Dionysus, since we have seen that similar names are borne for similar reasons in India by persons who have no claim whatever to be regarded as deities of the corn. Yet when all necessary deductions have been made on this score, the association of Dionysus with the winnowing-fan appears to be too intimate to be explained away as a mere reminiscence of a practice to which every Greek baby, whether human or divine, had to submit. That practice would hardly account either for the use of the winnowing-fan in the mysteries or for the appearance of the implement, filled with fruitage of various kinds, on the monuments which set forth the ritual of Dionysus. 45 45 Miss J. E. Harrison, “Mystica Vannus Iacchi,” Journal of Hellenic Studies , xxiii. (1903) pp. 296 sqq. ; id. , Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion , 2 pp. 518 sqq. ; L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States , v. (Oxford, 1909) p. 243. This last emblem points plainly to a conception of the god as a personification of the fruits of the earth in general; and as if to emphasise the idea of fecundity conveyed by such a symbol there sometimes appears among the fruits in the winnowing-fan an effigy of the male organ of generation. The prominent place which that effigy occupied in the worship of Dionysus 46 46 Herodotus, ii. 48, 49; Clement of Alexandria, Protrept. ii. 34, pp. 29-30, ed. Potter; Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum , 2 No. 19, vol. i. p. 32; M. P. Nilsson, Studia de Dionysiis Atticis (Lund, 1900), pp. 90 sqq. ; L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States , v. 125, 195, 205. hints broadly, if it does not strictly prove, that to the Greek mind the god stood for the powers of fertility in general, animal as well as vegetable. In the thought of the ancients no sharp line of distinction divided the fertility of animals from the fertility of plants; rather the two ideas met and blended in a nebulous haze. We need not wonder, therefore, that the same coarse but expressive emblem figured conspicuously in the ritual of Father Liber, the Italian counterpart of Dionysus, who in return for the homage paid to the symbol of his creative energy was believed to foster the growth of the crops and to guard the fields against the powers of evil. 47 47 Augustine, De civitate Dei , vii. 21.