James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)

Ghosts and gods bunged up in India. Demon plugged up and ghost nailed down.

Such remedies are not confined to Europe. At Bilda in Algeria, there is a sacred old olive-tree, in which pilgrims, especially women, knock nails for the purpose of ridding themselves of their ailments and troubles. 210 210 E. Doutté, Magie et Religion dans l'Afrique du Nord (Algiers, 1908), p. 436. Again, the Majhwars, a Dravidian tribe in the hill country of South Mirzapur, believe that all disease is due to ghosts, but that ghosts, when they become troublesome, can be shut up in a certain tree, which grows on a little islet in a very deep pool of the Sukandar, a tributary of the Kanhar river. Accordingly, when the country is infested by ghosts, in other words when disease is raging, a skilful wizard seeks for a piece of deer-horn in the jungle. When he has found it, he hammers it with a stone into the tree and thus shuts up the ghost. The tree is covered with hundreds of such pieces of horn. 211 211 W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Calcutta, 1896), iii. 436 sq. ; compare id. , Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India (Westminster, 1896), i. 43, 162. Compare E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (Madras, 1906), pp. 313, 331. Again, when a new settlement is being made in some parts of the North-Western Provinces of India, it is deemed necessary to apprehend and lay by the heels the local deities, who might otherwise do a deal of mischief to the intruders on their domain. A sorcerer is called in to do the business. For days he marches about the place mustering the gods to the tuck of drum. When they are all assembled, two men known as the Earthman and the Leafman, who represent the gods of the earth and of the trees respectively, become full of the spirit, being taken possession of bodily by the local deities. In this exalted state they shout and caper about in a fine frenzy, and their seemingly disjointed ejaculations, which are really the divine voice speaking through them, are interpreted by the sorcerer. When the critical moment has come, the wizard rushes in between the two incarnations of divinity, clutches at the spirits which are hovering about them in the air, and pours grains of sesame through their hands into a perforated piece of the wood of the sacred fig-tree. Then without a moment's delay he plasters up the hole with a mixture of clay and cow-dung, and carefully buries the piece of wood on the spot which is to be the shrine of the local deities. Needless to say that the gods themselves are bunged up in the wood and are quite incapable of doing further mischief, provided always that the usual offerings are made to them at the shrine where they live in durance vile. 212 212 W. Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India (Westminster, 1896), i. 102 sq. In this case the source of mischief is imprisoned, not in a tree, but in a piece of one; but the principle is clearly the same. Similarly in Corea an English lady observed at a cross-road a small log with several holes like those of a mouse-trap, one of which was plugged up doubly with bungs of wood. She was told that a demon, whose ravages spread sickness in a family, had been inveigled by a sorceress into that hole and securely bunged up. It was thought proper for all passers-by to step over the incarcerated devil, whether to express their scorn and abhorrence of him, or more probably as a means of keeping him forcibly down. 213 213 Mrs. Bishop, Korea and her Neighbours (London, 1898), ii. 143 sq. In Cochinchina a troublesome ghost can be confined to the grave by the simple process of knocking a nail or thrusting a bar of iron into the earth at the point where the head of the corpse may be presumed to repose. 214 214 P. Giran, Magie et Religion Annamites (Paris, 1912), pp. 132 sq.

Evils nailed into stones, walls, door-posts, and so on.

From knocking the mischief into a tree or a log it is only a step to knocking it into a stone, a door-post, a wall, or such like. At the head of Glen Mor, near Port Charlotte, in Islay, there may be seen a large boulder, and it is said that whoever drives a nail into this stone will thereafter be secure from attacks of toothache. A farmer in Islay told an enquirer some years ago how a passing stranger once cured his grandmother of toothache by driving a horse-nail into the lintel of the kitchen door, warning her at the same time to keep the nail there, and if it should come loose just to tap it with a hammer till it had a grip again. She had no more toothache for the rest of her life. 215 215 R. C. Maclagan, “Notes on folk-lore Objects collected in Argyleshire,” Folk-lore , vi. (1895) p. 158. In Brunswick it is open to any one to nail his toothache either into a wall or into a tree, as he thinks fit; the pain is cured quite as well in the one way as in the other. 216 216 R. Andree, Braunschweiger Volkskunde (Brunswick, 1896), p. 307. So in Beauce and Perche a healer has been known to place a new nail on the aching tooth of a sufferer and then knock the nail into a door, a beam, or a joist. 217 217 F. Chapiseau, Le Folk-lore de la Beauce et du Perche (Paris, 1902), i. 170. The procedure in North Africa is similar. You write certain Arabic letters and numbers on the wall; then, while the patient puts a finger on the aching tooth, you knock a nail, with a light tap of a hammer, into the first letter on the wall, reciting a verse of the Coran as you do so. Next you ask the sufferer whether the pain is now abated, and if he says “Yes” you draw out the nail entirely. But if he says “No,” you shift the nail to the next letter in the wall, and so on, till the pain goes away, which it always does, sooner or later. 218 218 E. Doutté, Magie et Religion dans l'Afrique du Nord (Algiers, 1908), pp. 228 sq. A Bohemian who fears he is about to have an attack of fever will snatch up the first thing that comes to hand and nail it to the wall. That keeps the fever from him. 219 219 J. V. Grohmann, Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen und Mähren , p. 116, § 1172.

Devils and ghosts nailed down in Morocco, Tunis, and Egypt. Headache nailed into a door or a wall. Plague pegged into a hole.

As in Europe we nail toothache or fever to a wall, so in Morocco they nail devils. A house in Mogador having been infested with devils, who threw stones about it in a way that made life a burden to the inmates, a holy man was called in to exorcise them, which he did effectually by pronouncing an incantation and driving a nail into the wall; at every stroke of the hammer a hissing sound announced that another devil had received his quietus. 220 220 A. Leared, Morocco and the Moors (London, 1876), pp. 275 sqq. Among the modern Arabs the soul of a murdered man must be nailed down. Thus if a man be murdered in Egypt, his ghost will rise from the ground where his blood was shed: but it can be prevented from doing so by driving a new nail, which has never been used, into the earth at the spot where the murder was committed. In Tripoli the practice is similar. Some years ago a native was murdered close to the door of a little Italian inn. Immediately the Arabs of the neighbourhood thronged thither and effectually laid the ghost with hammer and nail. When the innkeeper rashly attempted to remove the nail, he was warned that to do so would be to set the ghost free. 221 221 R. C. Thompson, Semitic Magic (London, 1908), p. 17. It would seem that in Macedonia demons and ghosts can be hammered into walls. See G. F. Abbott, Macedonian Folklore (Cambridge, 1903), p. 221. In Chittagong, as soon as a coffin has been carried out of the house, a nail is knocked into the threshold “to prevent death from entering the dwelling, at least for a time.” See Th. Bérengier, “Les funérailles à Chittagong,” Les Missions Catholiques , xiii. (1881) p. 504. In modern Egypt numbers of people afflicted with headache used to knock a nail into the great wooden door of the old south gate of Cairo, for the purpose of charming away the pain; others who suffered from toothache used to extract a tooth and insert it in a crevice of the door, or fix it in some other way, in order to be rid of toothache for the future. A holy and miraculous personage, invisible to mortal eyes, was supposed to have one of his stations at this gate. 222 222 E. W. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (Paisley and London, 1895), ch. x. p. 240. In Mosul also a sheikh can cure headache by first laying his hands on the sufferer's head and then hammering a nail into a wall. 223 223 R. C. Thompson, Semitic Magic (London, 1908), p. 18. Not far from Neuenkirchen, in Oldenburg, there is a farmhouse to which, while the Thirty Years' War was raging, the plague came lounging along from the neighbouring town in the shape of a bluish vapour. Entering the house it popped into a hole in the door-post of one of the rooms. The farmer saw his chance, and quick as thought he seized a peg and hammered it into the hole, so that the plague could not possibly get out. After a time, however, thinking the danger was past, he drew out the peg. Alas! with the peg came creeping and curling out of the hole the blue vapour once more. The plague thus let loose seized on every member of the family in that unhappy house and left not one of them alive. 224 224 L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg , ii. 120, § 428 a . A similar story is told of a house in Neuenburg ( op. cit. ii. 182, § 512 c ). Again, the great plague which devastated the ancient world in the reign of Marcus Antoninus is said to have originated in the curiosity and greed of some Roman soldiers, who, pillaging the city of Seleucia, came upon a narrow hole in a temple and incautiously enlarged the opening in the expectation of discovering treasure. But that which came forth from the hole was not treasure but the plague. It had been pent up in a secret chamber by the magic art of the Chaldeans; but now, released from its prison by the rash act of the spoilers, it stalked abroad and spread death and destruction from the Euphrates to the Nile and the Atlantic. 225 225 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiii. 6. 24.