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

The Matse negroes of Togoland think that the river Awo has power to carry away the sorrows of mankind. So when one of their friends has died, and their hearts are heavy, they go to the river with leaves of the raphia palm tied round their necks and drums in their hands. Standing on the bank they beat the drums and cast the leaves into the stream. As the leaves float away out of sight to the sound of the rippling water and the roll of the drums, they fancy that their sorrow too is lifted from them. 6 6 J. Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme (Berlin, 1906), p. 800. Similarly, the ancient Greeks imagined that the pangs of love might be healed by bathing in the river Selemnus. 7 7 Pausanias, vii. 23. 3. The Indians of Peru sought to purify themselves from their sins by plunging their heads in a river; they said that the river washed their sins away. 8 8 P. J. de Arriaga, Extirpacion de la Idolatria del Piru (Lima, 1621), p. 29.

Transference of evil to things.

An Arab cure for melancholy or madness caused by love is to put a dish of water on the sufferer's head, drop melted lead into it, and then bury the lead in an open field; thus the mischief that was in the man goes away. 9 9 This I learned from my friend W. Robertson Smith, who mentioned as his authority David of Antioch, Tazyin , in the story “Orwa.” Amongst the Miotse of China, when the eldest son of the house attains the age of seven years, a ceremony called “driving away the devil” takes place. The father makes a kite of straw and lets it fly away in the desert, bearing away all evil with it. 10 10 R. Andree, Ethnographische Parallele und Vergleiche (Stuttgart, 1878), pp. 29 sq. When an Indian of Santiago Tepehuacan is ill, he will sometimes attempt to rid himself of the malady by baking thrice seven cakes; of these he places seven in the top of the highest pine-tree of the forest, seven he lays at the foot of the tree, and seven he casts into a well, with the water of which he then washes himself. By this means he transfers the sickness to the water of the well and so is made whole. 11 11 “Lettre du curé de Santiago Tepehuacan à son évêque sur les mœurs et coutumes des Indiens soumis à ses soins,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (Paris), Deuxième Série, ii. (1834) p. 182. The Baganda believed that plague was caused by the god Kaumpuli, who resided in a deep hole in his temple. To prevent him from escaping and devastating the country, they battened him down in the hole by covering the top with plantain-stems and piling wild-cat-skins over them; there was nothing like wild-cat-skins to keep him down, so hundreds of wild cats were hunted and killed every year to supply the necessary skins. However, sometimes in spite of these precautions the god contrived to escape, and then the people died. When a garden or house was plague-stricken, the priests purified it by transferring the disease to a plantain-tree and then carrying away the tree to a piece of waste land. The way in which they effected the transference of the disease was this. They first made a number of little shields and spears out of plantain fibre and reeds and placed them at intervals along the path leading from the garden to the main road. A young plantain-tree, about to bear fruit, was then cut down, the stem was laid in the path leading to one of the plague-stricken huts, and it was speared with not less than twenty reed spears, which were left sticking in it, while some of the plantain-fibre shields were also fastened to it. This tree was then carried down the path to the waste land and left there. It went by the name of the Scapegoat ( kyonzire ). To make quite sure that the plague, after being thus deposited in the wilderness, should not return by the way it went, the priests raised an arch, covered with barkcloth, over the path at the point where it diverged from the main road. This arch was thought to interpose an insurmountable barrier to the return of the plague. 12 12 Rev. J. Roscoe, The Baganda (London, 1911), pp. 309 sq.

Dyak transference of evil to things.

Dyak priestesses expel ill-luck from a house by hewing and slashing the air in every corner of it with wooden swords, which they afterwards wash in the river, to let the ill-luck float away down stream. Sometimes they sweep misfortune out of the house with brooms made of the leaves of certain plants and sprinkled with rice-water and blood. Having swept it clean out of every room and into a toy-house made of bamboo, they set the little house with its load of bad luck adrift on the river. The current carries it away out to sea, where it shifts its baleful cargo to a certain kettle-shaped ship, which floats in mid-ocean and receives in its capacious hold all the ills that flesh is heir to. Well would it be with mankind if the evils remained for ever tossing far away on the billows; but, alas, they are dispersed from the ship to the four winds, and settle again, and yet again, on the weary Dyak world. On Dyak rivers you may see many of the miniature houses, laden with manifold misfortunes, bobbing up and down on the current, or sticking fast in the thickets that line the banks. 13 13 C. Hupe, “Korte Verhandeling over de Godsdienst, Zeden enz. der Dajakkers,” Tijdschrift voor Neêrlands Indië , 1846, dl. iii. pp. 149 sq. ; F. Grabowsky, “Die Theogonie der Dajaken auf Borneo,” Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie , v. (1892) p. 131.

Evils transferred to other persons through the medium of things.

These examples illustrate the purely beneficent side of the transference of evil; they shew how men seek to alleviate human sufferings by diverting them to material objects, which are then thrown away or otherwise disposed of so as to render them innocuous. Often, however, the transference of evil to a material object is only a step towards foisting it upon a living person. This is the maleficent side of such transferences. It is exemplified in the following cases. To cure toothache some of the Australian blacks apply a heated spear-thrower to the cheek. The spear-thrower is then cast away, and the toothache goes with it in the shape of a black stone called karriitch . Stones of this kind are found in old mounds and sandhills. They are carefully collected and thrown in the direction of enemies in order to give them toothache. 14 14 J. Dawson, Australian Aborigines (Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide, 1881), p. 59. In Mirzapur a mode of transferring disease is to fill a pot with flowers and rice and bury it in a pathway covered up with a flat stone. Whoever touches this is supposed to contract the disease. The practice is called chalauwa , or “passing on” the malady. This sort of thing goes on daily in Upper India. Often while walking of a morning in the bazaar you will see a little pile of earth adorned with flowers in the middle of the road. Such a pile usually contains some scabs or scales from the body of a smallpox patient, which are placed there in the hope that some one may touch them, and by catching the disease may relieve the sufferer. 15 15 W. Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India (Westminster, 1896), i. 164 sq. The Bahima, a pastoral people of the Uganda Protectorate, often suffer from deep-seated abscesses: “their cure for this is to transfer the disease to some other person by obtaining herbs from the medicine-man, rubbing them over the place where the swelling is, and burying them in the road where people continually pass; the first person who steps over these buried herbs contracts the disease, and the original patient recovers.” 16 16 Rev. J. Roscoe, “The Bahima, a Cow Tribe of Enkole,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute , xxxvii. (1907) p. 103. The practice of the Wagogo of German East Africa is similar. When a man is ill, the native doctor will take him to a cross-road, where he prepares his medicines, uttering at the same time the incantations which are necessary to give the drugs their medical virtue. Part of the dose is then administered to the patient, and part is buried under a pot turned upside down at the cross-road. It is hoped that somebody will step over the pot, and catching the disease, which lurks in the pot, will thereby relieve the original sufferer. A variation of this cure is to plaster some of the medicine, or a little of the patient's blood, on a wooden peg and to drive the peg into a tree; any one who passes the tree and is so imprudent as to draw out the peg, will carry away with it the disease. 17 17 Rev. J. Cole, “Notes on the Wagogo of German East Africa,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute , xxxiii. (1902) p. 313.

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