cloth fall off. He may not look behind him, but must go straight on. The priest then takes up the meat and the bark-cloth and goes in the opposite direction, never looking behind him. Afterwards he eats the meat with his friends in the open space before the chief's house. We are told

that "the evil is thus atoned for and clings to the barkcloth." Sometimes the treatment is different. After the door-posts have been bespattered with the blood of the cow, the patient is brought into the garden. Here the priest takes a plantain stem some six feet long, and having made a long cut down it, opens it wide enough for the sick man. to pass through. As the patient goes through he leaves his bark-cloth behind, and walks straight on into the house. After that the priest removes the plantain stem and throws it away on the road.1 Here plainly the patient is supposed to leave the sickness behind him adhering to the bark-cloth at the moment when he jumps over the blood-smeared stick in the doorway or squeezes himself through the cleft in the split plantain.

But if the intention of these ceremonies is merely to rid the performer of some harmful thing, whether a disease or a ghost or a demon, which is supposed to be clinging to him, we should expect to find that any narrow hole or opening would serve the purpose as well as a cleft tree or stick, an arch or ring of boughs, or a couple of posts fixed upright in the ground. And this expectation is not disappointed. On the coast of Morven and Mull thin ledges of rock may be seen. pierced with large holes near the sea. Consumptive people used to be brought thither, and after the tops of nine waves had been caught in a dish and thrown on the patient's head, he was made to pass through one of the rifted rocks thrice in the direction of the sun. In the parish of Madern in Cornwall there is a perforated stone called the Mên an Tol, or "holed stone," through which people formerly crept as a remedy for pains in the back and limbs; and at certain times of the year parents drew their children through the

1 From notes on the customs and religion of the Waganda sent me by the Rev. John Roscoe, missionary in Uganda.

2 John Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 451 sq.

hole to cure them of the rickets.1 Near Everek, on the site of the ancient Caesarea in Asia Minor, there is a rifted rock through which persons pass to rid themselves of a cough.2 Sometimes the hole which is to serve as a gateway to health and happiness is made by burrowing in the ground. In the Middle Ages both children and cattle were cured by being forced through a hole dug in the earth.3 Less than twenty years ago a Danish cure for childish ailments was to dig up several sods, arrange them so as to form a hole, and then pass the sick child through it. Among the Corannas, a people of the Hottentot race on the Orange River, "when a child recovers from a dangerous illness, a trench is dug in the ground, across the middle of which an arch is thrown, and an ox made to stand upon it; the child is then dragged under the arch. After this ceremony the animal is killed, and eaten by married people who have children, none else being permitted to participate of the feast." 5 Here the attempt to leave the sickness behind in the hole, which is probably the essence of the ceremony, may perhaps be combined with an endeavour to impart to the child the strength and vigour of the animal. have been familiar with the

1 W. Borlase, Antiquities, historical and monumental, of the County of Cornwall (London, 1779), p. 177 sq.

2 Carnoy et Nicolaides, Traditions populaires de PAsie Mineure, p. 338.

3 Grimm, D... ii. 975 sq.; H. Gaidoz, Un vieux rite medical, pp. 11,

21.

H. Feilberg, in Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, vii. (1897), p.

45.

J. Campbell, Travels in South Africa, Second Journey (London, 1822), ii. 346. Among the same people "when a person is ill, they bring an ox to the place where he is laid.

Two cuts are then made in one of its legs, extending down the whole length of it. The skin in the middle of the leg being raised up, the operator thrusts in his hand, to make way for that of the sick person, whose whole body is afterwards rubbed over with the blood of the animal. The ox after

Ancient India seems also to same primitive notion that enduring this torment is killed, and those who are married and have children, as in the other case, are the only partakers of the feast" (J. Campbell, op. cit. ii. 346 sq.). Here again the intention seems to be not so much to transfer the disease to the ox, as to transfuse the healthy life of the beast into the veins of the sick man. The same is perhaps true of the Welsh and French cure for whooping-cough, which consists in passing the little sufferer several times under an ass. See Brand, Popular Antiquities, iii. 28S; BérengerFéraud, in Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, Quatrième Série, i. (1890), p. 897; id., Superstitions et Survivances, i. 526. But more probably the intention really is to give the whooping cough to the animal; for it might reasonably be thought that the feeble whoop of the sick child would neither seriously im pair the lungs, nor perceptibly augment the stentorian bray, of the donkey.

sickness could, as it were, be stripped off the person of the sufferer by passing him through a narrow aperture; for in the Rigveda it is said that Indra cured Apala of a disease of the skin by drawing her through the yoke of the chariot; "thus the god made her to have a golden skin, purifying her thrice."1

We may therefore take it as tolerably certain that, in the opinion of the vulgar, the sympathetic relation established between a person and the tree through which he has been passed arises from the transference to the tree of some vital portion of the man, and further that this transference is supposed to take place in the crassest and most palpable fashion, the man leaving a part of himself behind him in the tree, just as he might leave shreds of his skin or clothing behind him in a thorn-hedge through which he had forced his way. That the thing which he thus deposits in the tree is often a disease or malady makes no difference; to the primitive mind a disease may easily present itself as a concrete material thing which forms part of the man and which may, like his skin or his nails, be detached from him by physical abrasion.

But in practice, as in folk-tales, it is not merely with trees and plants that the life of a person is occasionally believed to be united by a bond of physical sympathy. The same bond, it is supposed, may exist between a man and an animal or a thing, so that the death or destruction of the animal or thing is immediately followed by the death of the man. The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus was once informed by an astronomer that the life of Simeon, prince of Bulgaria, was bound up with a certain column in Constantinople, so that if the capital of the column were removed

1 H. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, p. 495. With the preceding examples before us, it seems worth while asking whether the ancient Italian practice of making conquered enemies to pass under a yoke may not in its origin have been a purificatory ceremony, designed to strip the foe of his malignant and hostile powers before dismissing him to his home. For apparently the ceremony was only

observed with prisoners who were about to be released; had it been a mere mark of ignominy, there seems to be no reason why it should not have been inflicted also on men who were doomed to die. See Livy, iii. 28, ix. 6, 15, x. 36. The so-called yoke in this case consisted of two spears set upright in the ground with a third spear laid transversely across them (Livy, iii. 28).

2

Simeon would immediately die. The Emperor took the hint and removed the capital, and at the same hour, as the emperor learned by inquiry, Simeon died of heart disease in Bulgaria. Amongst the Karens of Burma "the knife with which the navel-string is cut is carefully preserved for the child. The life of the child is supposed to be in some way connected with it, for if lost or destroyed it is said the child will not be long-lived." When Mr. Macdonald was one day sitting in the house of a Hlubi chief, awaiting the appearance of that great man, who was busy decorating his person, a native pointed to a pair of magnificent ox-horns, and said, "Ntame has his soul in these horns." The horns were those of an animal which had been sacrificed, and they were held sacred. A magician had fastened them to the roof to protect the house and its inmates from the thunderbolt. "The idea," adds Mr. Macdonald, "is in no way foreign to South African thought. A man's soul there may dwell in the roof of his house, in a tree, by a spring of water, or on some mountain scaur."3 An old Mang'anje woman in the West Shire district of British Central Africa used to wear round her neck an ivory ornament, hollow, and about three inches long, which she called her life or soul (moyo wanga). Naturally, she would not part with it; a planter tried to buy it of her, but in vain.* Some twenty years ago, two English missionaries established at San Salvador, the capital of the king of Congo, asked the natives repeatedly whether any of them had seen the strange, big, East African goat which Stanley had given to a chief at Stanley Pool in 1877. But their inquiries were fruitless; no native would admit that he had seen the goat. "Some years afterward, the missionaries discovered that the reason they could obtain no reply to their inquiry was that the people all thought that they, the missionaries, believed the goat contained the spirit of the

1 Cedrenus, Compend. Histor. p. 625 B, vol. ii. p. 308, ed. Bekker.

2 F. Mason, "Physical Character of the Karens," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1866, pt. ii. p. 9.

3 J. Macdonald, Religion and Myth, p. 190.

king of San Salvador, and

4 Alice Werner, in a letter to the author, dated 25th September 1899. Miss Werner knew the old woman. Compare Contemporary Review, 1xx. (July-December 1896), p. 389, where Miss Werner describes the ornament as a rounded peg, tapering to a point, with a neck or notch at the top.

therefore they wished to obtain possession of it, and so exercise an evil influence over the king." Among several

» 2

of the tribes on the banks of the Niger, between Lokoja and the delta, there exists "a belief in the possibility of a man possessing an alter ego in the form of some animal, such as a crocodile or hippopotamus. It is believed that such a person's life is bound up with that of the animal to such an extent that whatever affects the one produces a corresponding impression upon the other, and that if one dies the other must speedily do so too. It happened not very long ago that an Englishman shot a hippopotamus close to a native village; the friends of a woman who died the same night in the village demanded and eventually obtained five pounds as compensation for the murder of the woman.' At home in England beliefs of the same sort are not unknown. In Yorkshire witches are thought to stand in such peculiarly close relations to hares, that if a particular hare is killed or wounded, a certain witch will at the same moment be killed or receive a hurt in her body exactly corresponding to the wound in the hare.3 In like manner the Yakuts of Siberia believe that every shaman or wizard keeps his soul, or one of his souls, incarnate in an animal which is carefully concealed from all the world. "Nobody can find my external soul, it lies hidden far away in the stony mountains of Edzhigansk," said one famous wizard. Only once a year, when the last snows melt and the earth turns black, do these incarnate souls of shamans in animal form appear among the dwellings of men. They wander everywhere, but none save shamans can see them. The strong ones sweep roaring and noisily along, the weak steal about quietly and furtively. Often they fight, and then the wizard whose external soul is beaten, falls ill or dies. The weakest and most cowardly wizards are they whose souls are incarnate in the shape of dogs, for the dog gives his human double no peace, but gnaws his heart and tears his body. The most powerful wizards are they whose

1 Herbert Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals (London, 1890), p. 53.

2 C. H. Kobinson, Hausaland (London, 1896), p. 36 sq.

3 Th. Parkinson, Yorkshire Legends and Traditions, Second Series (London, 1889), p. 160 sq.; J. C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish (London, 1891), p. 82 sqq.