Mythology and globalisation
leon....@gmail.com
or telling.
But we misunderstand that it is this mythology that brings us our
proverbs, ancestoral wisdom and foolishness Legends e.g. We have lost
our Belly Thinking *Tideman ! We are the ratiothinkers and yet we are
all too soon so sensitive. I think we should revaluate Mythology and
be no stranger to different cultures and their ways of life; Don't let
Globalisation deculturalise us. Share your meaning and insight on this
issue!! Thanks!!
magie en vreemde dingen bij natuurvolkeren/foto dansende sjamaan
siberie
05/11/06
MAGIC THROUGH TANGIBLE THINGS
THE dread of being harmed through so intangible a thing as
his name, which haunts the savage, is the extreme and more
subtle form of the same dread which, for a like reason, makes
him adopt precautions against cuttings of his hair, parings of
his nails, his saliva, excreta, and the water in which his
clothes--when he wears any--are washed, falling under the
control of the sorcerer. Miss Mary Kingsley says that 'the fear
of nail and hair clippings getting into the hands of evilly
disposed persons is ever present to the West African. The
Igalwa and other tribes will allow no one but a trusted friend
to do their hair, and bits of nails or hair are carefully burnt
or thrown away into a river. Blood, even that from a small cut
on the finger. or from a fit of nose-bleeding, is most
carefully covered up and stamped out if it has fallen on the
earth. Blood is the life, and life in Africa means a spirit,
hence the liberated blood is the liberated spirit, and
liberated spirits are always whipping into people who don't
want them. Crammed with Pagan superstitions, the Italian who is
reluctant to trust a lock of his hair to another stands on the
same plane as the barbarian. Sometimes, as was the custom among
the Incas, and as is still the custom among Turks and
Esthonians, the refuse of hair and nails is preserved so that
the owner may have them at the resurrection of the body. In
connection with this, one of my sons tells me that his Jamaican
negro housekeeper speaks of the old-time blacks keeping their
hair-cuttings to be put in a pillow in their coffins, and
preserving the parings of their nails, because they would need
them in the next world. It is a common superstition among
ourselves that when children's teeth come out they should not
be thrown away, lest the child has to seek for the lost tooth
after death. On the other hand, it is an equally common
practice to throw the teeth in the fire 'out of harm's way.'
But the larger number of practices give expression to the
belief in what is known as 'sympathetic magic'; as we say,
'like cures like,' Or more appositely, in barbaric theory,
'kills like.' Things outwardly resembling one another are
believed to possess the same qualities, effects being thereby
brought about in the man himself by the production of like
effects in things belonging to him, or in images or effigies of
him. The Zulu sorcerers, when they have secured a portion oftheir
victim's dress, will bury it in some secret place, so
that, as it rots away, his life may decay. In the New Hebrides
it was the common practice to hide nail-parings and cuttings of
hair, and to give the remains of food carefully to the pigs.
'When the mae snake carried away a fragment of food into the
place sacred to a spirit, the man who had eaten of the food
would sicken as the fragment decayed.' Brand tells that in a
witchcraft trial in the seventeenth century, the accused
confessed 'having buried a glove of the said Lord Henry in the
ground, so that as the glove did rot and waste, the liver of
the said lord might rot and waste'; and the New Britain
sorcerer of to-day will burn a castaway banana skin, so that
the man who carelessly left it unburied may die a tormenting
death. A fever-stricken Australian native girl told the doctor
who attended her that 'some moons back, when the Goulburn
blacks were encamped near Melbourne, a young man named
Gibberook came behind her and cut off a lock of her hair, and
that she was sure he had buried it, and that it was rotting
somewhere. Her marm-bu-la (kidney fat) was wasting away, and
when the stolen hair had completely rotted she would die.' She
added that her name had been lately cut on a tree by some wild
black, and that was another sign of death. Her name was Murran,
which means 'a leaf,' and the doctor afterwards found that the
figure of leaves had been carved on a gum-tree as described by
the girl. The sorceress said that the spirit of a black fellow
had cut the figure on the tree. The putting of sharp stones in
the foot-tracks of an enemy is believed to maim him, as a nail
is driven into a horse's footprint to lame him, while the
chewing of a piece of wood is thought to soften the heart of a
man with whom a bargain is being driven. Folk-medicine, the
wide world through, is full of prescriptions based on
sympathetic or antipathetic magic. Its doctrine of 'seals' or
'signatures' is expressed in the use of yellow flowers for
jaundice, and of eye-bright for ophthalmia, while among the
wonder-working roots there is the familiar mandrake of human
shape, credited, in virtue of that resemblance, with magic
power. In Umbria, where the peasants seek to nourish the
consumptive on rosebuds and dew, the mothers take their
children, wasted by sickness, to some boundary stone, perchance
once sacred to Hermes, and pray to God to stay the illness or
end the sufferer's life. The Cheroki make a decoction of the
cone-flower for weak eyes because of the fancied resemblance of
that plant to the strong-sighted eye of the deer; and they also
drink an infusion of the tenacious burrs of the common beggars'
lice, an American species of the genus Desmodium, to strengthenthe
memory. To ensure a fine voice, they boil crickets, and
drink the liquor. In Suffolk and other parts of these islands,
a common remedy for warts is to secretly pierce a snail or
'dodman' with a gooseberry-bush thorn, rub the snail on the
wart, and then bury it, so that, as it decays the wart may
wither away.
Chinese doctors administer the head, middle or roots of
plants, as the case may be, to cure the complaints of their
patients in the head, body, or legs. And with the practice of
the Zulu medicine-man, who takes the bones of the oldest bull
or dog of the tribe, giving scrapings of these to the sick, so
that their lives may be prolonged to old age, we may compare
that of doctors in the seventeenth century, who with less
logic, but perchance unconscious humour, gave their patients
pulverised mummy to prolong their years. 'Mummie,' says Sir
Thomas Browne, 'is become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds,
and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.'
In Plutarch's Roman Questions, which Dr. Jevons, in his
valuable preface to the reprint of Philemon Holland's
translation, remarks 'may fairly be said to be the earliest
formal treatise written on the subject of folk-lore,' reference
is made to the Roman customs of not completely clearing the
table of food, and 'never putting foorth the light of a lampe,
but suffering it to goe out of the owne accord.' These
obviously come under the head of sympathetic magic, 'being
safeguards against starvation and darkness.' In Melanesia, if a
man wounds another with an arrow, he will drink hot juices and
chew irritating leaves to bring about agony to the wounded, and
he will keep his bow taut, pulling it at intervals to cause
nerve-tension and tetanus in his victim. Here, though wide seas
between them roll, we may compare the same philosophy of things
at work. The 'sympathetic powder' used by Sir Kenelm Digby in
the seventeenth century was believed to cure a wound if applied
to the sword that inflicted it; and, to-day, the Suffolk farmer
keeps the sickle with which he has cut himself free from rust,
so that the wound may not fester. Here, too, lies the answer to
the question that puzzled Plutarch. 'What is the reason that of
all those things which be dedicate and consecrated to the gods,
the custome is at Rome, that onely the spoiles of enemies
conquered in the warres are neglected and suffered to run to
decay in processe of time: neither is there any reverence done
unto them, nor repaired be they at any time when they wax
olde?' Of course the custom is the outcome of the belief that
the enemy's power waned as his armour rusted away.
Equally puzzling to Plutarch was the custom among Roman
women 'of the most noble an auncient houses' to 'carry little
moones upon their shoes.' These were of the nature of amulets,
designed to deceive the lunacy-bringing moon spirit, so that it
might enter the crescent charm instead of the wearer. 'The
Chaldeans diverted the spirit of disease from the sick man by
providing an image in the likeness of the spirit to attract the
plague.' 'Make of it an image in his likeness (i.e. of Namtar,
the plague); apply it to the living flesh of his body (i.e. of
the sick man), may the malevolent Namtar who possesses him pass
into the image.' But the reverse effect was more frequently the
aim. A Chaldean tablet records the complaint of some victim,
that 'he who enchants images has charmed away my life by
image'; and Ibn Khaldun, an Arabian writer of the fourteenth
century, describes how the Nabathean sorcerers of the Lower
Euphrates made an image of the person whom they plotted to
destroy. They transcribed his name on his effigy, uttered magic
curses over it, and then, after divers other ceremonies, left
the evil spirits to complete the fell work. In ancient Egyptian
belief the ka of a living person could be transferred to a wax
image by the repetition of formulae and there is no break in
the long centuries between Accadian magic, which so profoundly
influenced the West, and the practice of injuring a man through
his image, which flourishes to-day. The Ojibways believe that
'by drawing the figure of any person in sand or clay, or by
considering any object as the figure of a person, and then
pricking it with a sharp stick or other weapon, or doing
anything that would be done to the living body to cause pain or
death, the person thus represented will suffer likewise.' King
James I., in his Daemonology, Book II. ch. v., speaks of 'the
devil teaching how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by
roasting thereof the persons that they bear the name of may be
continually melted or dried away by sickness; and, as showing
the continuity of the idea, there are exhibited in the Pitt
Rivers Museum at Oxford, besides similar objects from the
Straits Settlements, a 'Corp Creidh' or 'clay body' from the
Highlands, and a pig's heart from Devonshire, with pins stuck
in them.
The assumed correspondence between physical phenomena and
human actions is further shown in Dr Johnson's observation,
when describing his visit to the Hebrides, that the peasants
expect better crops by sowing their seed at the new moon; and
he recalls from memory a precept annually given in the
almanack, 'to kill hogs when the moon is waxing, that the bacon
may prove the better in boiling.' With the ancient Roman custom
of throwing images of the corn-spirit (doubtless substitutes of
actual human offerings) into the river, so that the crops might
be drenched with rain, we may compare the practice of the
modern Servians and Thessalians, who strip a little girl naked,
but wrap her completely in leaves and flowers, and then dance
and sing round her, while bowls of water are poured over her to
make the rain come. The life of man pulsates with the great
heart of nature in many a touching superstition, as in the
belief in the dependence of the earth's fertility on the vigour
of the tree-spirit incarnated in the priest-king; in the group
which connects the waning of the days with the decline of human
years; and, pathetically enough, in the widespread notion, of
which Dickens makes use in David Copperfield, that life goes
out with the ebb-tide.
'I was on the point of asking him if he knew me, when he
tried to stretch out his arm, and said te me, distinctly, with
a pleasant smile, "Barkis is willin'."
'And, it being low water, he went out with the tide.'
The general idea has only to be decked in another garb to
fit the frame of mind which still reserves some pet sphere of
nature for the operation of the special and the arbitrary. 'The
narrower the range of man's knowledge of physical causes, the
wider is the field which he has to fill up with hypothetical
causes of a metaphysical or supernatural character.'
We must not pass from these examples of belief in
sympathetic connection, drawn from home as well as foreign
sources, without reference to its significance in connection
with food outside the prohibitions which are usually explained
by the totem, that is, abstinence from the plant or animal
which is regarded as the tribal ancestor.
Captain Wells, who was killed near Chicago in 1812, and who
was celebrated for his valour among the Indians, was cut up
into many parts, which were distributed among the allied
tribes, so that all might have the opportunity of getting a
taste of the courageous soldier. For it is a common belief
among barbaric folk that by eating the flesh of a brave man a
portion of his courage is absorbed. The Botecudos sucked the
blood of living victims that they might imbibe spiritual force,
and among the Brazilian natives the first food given to a
child, when weaning it, was the flesh of an enemy. Cannibalism,
the origin of which is probably due to a scarcity of animal
food, therefore acquires this superadded motive, in which also
lies the explanation of the eating of, or abstaining from, the
flesh of certain animals. The lion's flesh gives courage, the
deer's flesh causes timidity; and in more subtle form of the
same idea, barbaric hunters will abstain from oil lest the game
slip through their fingers. Contrariwise, the Hessian lad
thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby
girl's cap in his pocket: a symbolic way of repudiating
manhood.
Most suggestive of all is the extension of the idea to the
eating of the slain god, whereby his spirit is imbibed, and
communion with the unseen secured. To quote Mr. Frazer, the
savage believes that 'by eating the body of the god he shares
in the god's attributes and powers; and when the god is a corngod,
the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the
juice of the grape is his blood; and so, by eating the bread
and drinking the wine, the worshipper partakes of the real body
and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rite of
a vine-god, like Dionysus, is not an act of revelry; it is a
solemn sacrament.' Experience shows that people possessing
intelligence above the ordinary often fail to see the bearing
of one set of facts upon another set, especially if the
application can be made to their traditional beliefs, whether
these are only mechanically held, or ardently defended. It is,
therefore, not wholly needless to point out that Mr. Frazer's
explanation is to be extended to the rites attaching to
Christianity, transubstantiation being, laterally or lineally,
the descendant of the barbaric idea of eating the god, whereby
the communicant becomes a 'partaker of the divine nature.' In
connection with this we may cite Professor Robertson Smith's
remark, that a notable application of the idea of eating the
flesh or drinking the blood of another being, so that a man
absorbs its nature or life into his own, is the rite of
bloodbrotherhood,
the simplest form of which is in two men opening
their veins and sucking one another's blood. 'Thenceforth their
lives are not two, but one. ' Among the Unyamuezi the ceremony
is performed by cutting incisions in each other's legs and
letting the blood trickle together. Fuller reference to this
widely diffused rite will, however, have more fitting place
later on, when treating of the custom of the exchange of names
which, as will be seen, often goes with it. Belief in virtue
inhering in the dead man's body involves belief in virtue in
his belongings, in which is the key to the belief in the
efficacy of relics as vehicles of supernatural power. Here the
continuity is clearly traceable. There is no fundamental
difference between the savage who carries about with him the
skull-bones of his ancestor as a charm or seat of oracle, and
the Buddhist who places the relics of holy men beneath the
tope, or the Catholic who deposits the fragments of saints or
martyrs within the altar which their presence sanctifies; while
the mother, treasuring her dead child's lock of hair, witnesses
to the vitality of feelings drawn from perennial springs in
human nature. Well-nigh every relic which the Church safeguards
beneath her shrines, or exhibits, at stated seasons, for the
adoration of the crowd, is spurious, yet no amount of ridicule
thrown on these has impaired the credulity whose strength lies
in the dominance of the wish to believe over the desire to
know.
In 'Whuppity Stoorie' the widow and the witch 'watted
thooms' over their bargain. Man's saliva plays a smaller, but
by no means inactive, part in his superstitions. A goodly-sized
book might be written on the history and ethnic distribution of
the customs connected with it. Employed as vehicle of blessing
or cursing, of injury or cure, by peoples intellectually as far
apart as the Jews, the South Sea Islanders, the medieval
Christians, and the Central Africans of to-day, the potencies
of this normally harmless secretion have been most widely
credited. Among ourselves it is a vehicle of one of the
coarsest forms of assault, or the degenerate representative of
the old luck-charm in the spitting on money by the cabman or
the costermonger. Among certain barbaric races, however, the
act expresses the kindliest feeling and the highest compliment.
Consul Petherick says that a Sudanese chief, after grasping his
hand, spat on it, and then did the like to his face, a form of
salute which the consul returned with interest, to the delight
of the recipient. Among the Masai the same custom is universal;
and while it is bad form to kiss a lady, it is comme il faut to
spit on her. The authority who reports this adds an account of
certain generative virtues with which saliva, especially if
administered by a white man, is accredited. But it is as a
prophylactic, notably in the form of fasting spittle, and as a
protection against sorcery and all forms of black magic, that
we meet with frequent references to it in ancient writers, and
in modern books of travel. 'Spittle,' says Brand, 'was esteemed
a charm against all kinds of fascination, notably against the
evil eye, the remedy for which, still in vogue among the
Italians, is to spit three times upon the breast, as did the
urban maiden in Theocritus when she refused her rustic wooer.
It came out in the course of a murder trial at Philippopolis,
that the Bulgarians believe that spitting gives immunity from
the consequences of perjury. An example of its use in
benediction occurs, as when the Abomel of Alzpirn spat on his
clergy and laity; but more familiar are the cases of its
application in baptism and name-giving. Seward says that 'the
custom of nurses lustrating the children by spittle was one of
the ceremonies used on the Dies Nominalis, the day the child
was named; so that there can be no doubt of the Papists
deriving this custom from the heathen nurses and grandmothers.
They have indeed christened it, as it were, by flinging in some
Scriptural expressions; but then they have carried it to a more
filthy extravagance by daubing it on the nostrils of adults as
well as of children.' Ockley tells that when Hasan was born,
his grandfather, Mohammed, spat in his mouth as he named him;
and Mungo Park thus describes the name-giving ceremony among
the Mandingo people. 'A child is named when it is seven or
eight days old. The ceremony commences by shaving the head. The
priest offers a prayer, in which he solicits the blessing of
God upon the child and all the company, and then whispering a
few sentences in the child's ear, spits three times in his
face, after which, pronouncing his name aloud, he returns the
child to its mother.'
All which, of course, has vital connection with the belief
in inherent virtue in saliva, and therefore with the widespread
group of customs which have for their object the prevention of
its falling within the power of the sorcerer. Suabian folkmedicine
prescribes that the saliva should at once be trodden
into the ground lest some evil-disposed person use it for
sorcery. As the result of extensive acquaintance with the North
American Indians, Captain Bourke says that all of them are
careful to spit into their cloaks or blankets and Kane adds his
testimony that the natives of Columbia River are never seen to
spit without carefully stamping out the saliva. This they do
lest an enemy should find it, and work injury through it. The
chief officer of the 'king' of Congo receives the royal saliva
in a rag, which he doubles up and kisses; while in Hawaii the
guardianship of the monarch's expectorations was intrusted only
to a chief of high rank, who held the dignified office of
spittoon-bearer to the king, and who, like his fellow-holders
of the same trust under other Polynesian rulers, buried the
saliva beyond the reach of malicious medicine-men. Finally, as
bearing on the absence of any delimiting lines between a man's
belongings, there may be cited Brand's reference to Debrio. He
'portrays the manners and ideas of the continent, and mentions
that upon those hairs which come out of the head in combing
they spit thrice before they throw them away.'
The reluctance of savages to have their portraits taken is
explicable when brought into relation with the group of
confused ideas under review. Naturally, the man thinks that
virtue has gone out of him, that some part of his vulnerable
self is put at the mercy of his fellows, when he sees his
'counterfeit presentment' on a sheet of paper, or peering from
out magic glass. The reluctance of unlettered people among
ourselves to have their likenesses taken is not uncommon. From
Scotland to Somerset there comes evidence about the ill-health
or ill-luck which followed the camera, of folks who 'took bad
and died' after being 'a-tookt.' These facts will remove any
surprise at Catlin's well known story of the accusation brought
against him by the Yukons that he had made buffaloes scarce by
putting so many pictures of them in his book.
