James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 08 of 12)

At Onitsha, a town on the left bank of the Niger, a missionary once met a funeral procession which he describes as very singular. The real body had already been buried in the house, but a piece of wood in the form of a [pg 099] sofa and covered up was being borne by two persons on their heads, attended by a procession of six men and six women. The men carried cutlasses and the women clapped their hands as they passed along each street, crying, “This is the dead body of him that is dead, and is gone into the world of spirits.” Meantime the rest of the villagers had to keep indoors. 269 269 S. Crowther and J. C. Taylor, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger (London, 1859), pp. 250 sq. The sham corpse was probably intended as a lure to draw away prowling demons from the real body. So among the Angoni, who inhabit the western bank of Lake Nyassa, there is a common belief that demons hover about the dying and dead before burial in order to snatch away their souls to join their own evil order. Guns are fired and drums are beaten to repel these spiritual foes, but a surer way of baulking their machinations is to have a mock funeral and so mislead and confound them. A sham corpse is made up out of anything that comes to hand, and it is treated exactly as if it were what it pretends to be. This lay figure is then carried some distance to a grave, followed by a great crowd weeping and wailing as if their hearts would break, while the rub-a-dub of drums and the discharge of guns add to the uproar. Meantime the real corpse is being interred as quietly and stealthily as possible near the house. Thus the demons are baffled; for when the dummy corpse has been laid in the earth with every mark of respect, and the noisy crowd has dispersed, the fiends swoop down on the mock grave only to find a bundle of rushes or some such trash in it; but the true grave they do not know and cannot find. 270 270 J. Macdonald, “East Central African Customs,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute , xxii. (1893) pp. 114 sq. ; id. , Myth and Religion (London, 1893), pp. 155 sq. (from MS. notes of Dr. Elmslie). Similarly among the Bakundu of the Cameroons two graves are always made, one in the hut of the deceased and another somewhere else, and no one knows where the corpse is really buried. The custom is apparently intended to guard the knowledge of the real grave from demons, who might make an ill use of the body, if not of the soul, of the departed. 271 271 B. Schwarz, Kamerun (Leipsic, 1886), pp. 256 sq. ; E. Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie Universelle , xiii. 68 sq. In like manner the Kamilaroi tribe of Australia are reported to make two graves, a real [pg 100] one and an empty one, for the purpose of cheating a malevolent spirit called Krooben. 272 272 J. Fraser, “The Aborigines of New South Wales,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales , xvi. (1882) p. 229; A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London, 1904), p. 467. So, too, some of the Nagas of Assam dig two graves, a sham grave made conspicuous on purpose to attract the notice of the evil spirits, and the real grave made inconspicuous to escape their attention: a figure is set up over the false grave. 273 273 This I learned from Dr. Burton Brown (formerly of 3 Via Venti Setembri, Rome), who lived for some time among the Nagas. Isis is said to have made many false graves of the dead Osiris in Egypt in order that his foe Typhon might not be able to find the true one. 274 274 Strabo, xvii. 1. 23, p. 803; Plutarch, Isis et Osiris , 18. In Bombay, if a person dies on an unlucky day, a dough figure of a man is carried on the bier with him and burnt with his corpse. This is supposed to hinder a second death from occurring in the family, 275 275 Panjab Notes and Queries , ii. p. 39, § 240 (December 1884). probably because the demons are thought to take the dough figure instead of a real person.

Again, effigies are often employed as a means of preventing or curing sickness; the demons of disease either mistake the effigies for living people or are persuaded or compelled to enter them, leaving the real men and women well and whole. 276 276 Some examples of this vicarious use of images as substitutes for the sick have been given in an earlier part of this work. See Taboo and the Perils of the Soul , pp. 62 sq. Thus the Alfoors of Minahassa, in Celebes, will sometimes transport a sick man to another house, while they leave on his bed a dummy made up of a pillow and clothes. This dummy the demon is supposed to mistake for the sick man, who consequently recovers. 277 277 N. Graafland, De Minahassa , (Rotterdam, 1869), i. 326. Cure or prevention of this sort seems to find especial favour with the Dyaks of Borneo. Thus, when an epidemic is raging among them, the Dyaks of the Katoengouw river set up wooden images at their doors in the hope that the demons of the plague may be deluded into carrying off the effigies instead of the people. 278 278 P. J. Veth, Borneo's Wester-Afdeeling (Zaltbommel, 1854-56), ii. 309. Among the Oloh Ngadju of Borneo, when a sick man is supposed to be suffering from the assaults of a ghost, puppets of dough or rice-meal are made and thrown under [pg 101] the house as substitutes for the patient, who thus rids himself of the ghost. So if a man has been attacked by a crocodile and has contrived to escape, he makes a puppet of dough or meal and casts it into the water as a vicarious offering; otherwise the water-god, who is conceived in the shape of a crocodile, might be angry. 279 279 F. Grabowsky, “Ueber verschiedene weniger bekannte Opfer bei den Oloh Ngadju in Borneo,” Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie , i. (1888) pp. 132 sq. In certain of the western districts of Borneo if a man is taken suddenly and violently sick, the physician, who in this part of the world is generally an old woman, fashions a wooden image and brings it seven times into contact with the sufferer's head, while she says: “This image serves to take the place of the sick man; sickness, pass over into the image.” Then, with some rice, salt, and tobacco in a little basket, the substitute is carried to the spot where the evil spirit is supposed to have entered into the man. There it is set upright on the ground, after the physician has invoked the spirit as follows: “O devil, here is an image which stands instead of the sick man. Release the soul of the sick man and plague the image, for it is indeed prettier and better than he.” Similar substitutes are used almost daily by these Dyaks for the purpose of drawing off evil influences from anybody's person. Thus, when an Ot Danom baby will not stop squalling, its maternal grandmother takes a large leaf, fashions it into a puppet to represent the child, and presses it against the infant's body. Having thus decanted the spirit, so to speak, from the baby into the puppet, she pierces the effigy with little arrows from a blow-gun, thereby killing the spirit that had vexed her child. 280 280 E. L. M. Kühr, “Schetsen uit Borneo's Westerafdeeling,” Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië , xlvii. (1897) pp. 60 sq. For another mode in which these same Dyaks seek to heal sickness by means of an image, see Taboo and the Perils of the Soul , pp. 55 sq. Similarly in the island of Dama, between New Guinea and Celebes, where sickness is ascribed to the agency of demons, the doctor makes a doll of palm-leaf and lays it, together with some betel, rice, and half of an empty eggshell, on the patient's head. Lured by this bait the demon quits the sufferer's body and enters the palm-leaf doll, which the wily doctor thereupon promptly decapitates. This may [pg 102] reasonably be supposed to make an end of the demon and of the sickness together. 281 281 J. G. F. Riedel, De sluik- en kroesharige rassen tusschen Selebes en Papua (The Hague, 1886), p. 465. A Dyak sorcerer, being called in to prescribe for a little boy who suffered from a disorder of the stomach, constructed two effigies of the boy and his mother out of bundles of clothes and offered them, together with some of the parents' finery, to the devil who was plaguing the child; it was hoped that the demon would take the effigies and leave the boy. 282 282 H. Ling Roth, “Low's Natives of Borneo,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute , xxi. (1892) p. 117. Batta magicians can conjure the demon of disease out of the patient's body into an image made out of a banana-tree with a human face and wrapt up in magic herbs; the image is then hurriedly removed and thrown away or buried beyond the boundaries of the village. 283 283 B. Hagen, “Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Battareligion,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde , xxviii. (1883) p. 531. Sometimes the image, dressed as a man or a woman according to the sex of the patient, is deposited at a cross-road or other thoroughfare, in the hope that some passer-by, seeing it, may start and cry out, “Ah! So-and-So is dead”; for such an exclamation is supposed to delude the demon of disease into a belief that he has accomplished his fell purpose, so he takes himself off and leaves the sufferer to get well. 284 284 M. Joustra, “Het leven, de zeden en gewoonten der Bataks,” Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap , xlvi. (1902) pp. 413 sq. The Mai Darat, a Sakai tribe of the Malay Peninsula, attribute all kinds of diseases to the agency of spirits which they call nyani ; fortunately, however, the magician can induce these maleficent beings to come out of the sick person and take up their abode in rude figures of grass, which are hung up outside the houses in little bell-shaped shrines decorated with peeled sticks. 285 285 N. Annandale and H. C. Robinson, “Some Preliminary Results of an Expedition to the Malay Peninsula,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute , xxxii. (1902) p. 416.