interfere in his affairs. In Siberia, in lawsuits between Russians
and the wild Ostiaks, it is described as customary to bring into
court the head of a bear, the Ostiak making the gesture of eating,
and calling on the bear to devour him in like manner if he does
not tell the truth (G. A. Erman, Travels in Siberia, i. 492,
London, 1848). Similar oaths are still sworn on the head or
skin of a tiger by the Santals and other indigenous tribes of
India. To modern views, a bear or a tiger seems at any rate a
more rational being to appeal to than a river or the sun, but in
the earlier stage of nature-religion these and other great objects
of nature are regarded as animate and personal. The prevalence
of river-worship is seen in the extent to which in the old and
modern World oaths by rivers are most sacred. In earlier ages
men swore inviolably by Styx or Tiber, and to this day an
oath on water of the Ganges is to the Hindu the most' binding of
pledges, for the goddess will take awful vengeance on the children
of the perjurer. The Tungus brandishes a knife before the sun,
saying, “If I lie may the sun plunge sickness into my entrails
like this knife.” The natural transition from swearing by these
great objects of nature to invoking gods conceived in human
form is well shown in the treaty-oath between the Macedonians
and the Carthaginians recorded by Polybius (vii. 9); here the
sun and moon and earth, the rivers and meadows and waters,
are invoked side by side with Zeus and Hera and Apollo, and
the gods of the Carthaginians. The heaven-god, able to smite
the perjurer with his lightning, was invoked by the Romans,
when a hog was slain with the sacred flint representing the
thunderbolt, with the invocation to Jove so to smite the Roman
people if they broke the oath (Liv. i. 24; Polyb. iii. 25). Another
form of this Aryan rite was preserved by the old Slavonic nation
of Prussia, where a man would lay his right hand on his own
neck and his left on the holy oak, saying, “May Perkun (the
thunder-god) destroy me!” The oaths of the lower culture
show a remarkable difference from those of later stages. In the
apparently primitive forms the curse on the perjurer is to take
effect in this world. But as nations became more observant,
experience must have shown that bears and tigers were as apt
to kill truth-tellers as perjurers, and that even the lightning-flash
falls without moral discrimination. In the Clouds of
Aristophanes, indeed, men have come openly to ridicule such
beliefs, the Socrates of the play pointing out that notorious
perjurers go unharmed, while Zeus hurls his bolts at his own
temple, and the tall oaks, as if an oak-tree could perjure itself.
The doctrine of miraculous earthly retribution on the perjurer
lasted on in legend, as where Eusebius relates how three villains
conspired to bring a false accusation against Narcissus, bishop
of Jerusalem, which accusation they confirmed by solemn oath
before the church, one wishing that if he swore falsely he might
perish by fire, one that he might die of the pestilence, one that
he might lose his eyes; a spark no man knew from whence
burned to ashes the first perjurer’s house and all within, the
second was consumed by the plague from head to foot, whereupon
the third confessed the crime with tears so copious that he lost
his sight (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. vi. 9). As a general rule, however,
the supernatural retribution on perjury has been transferred
from the present world to the regions beyond the grave, as is
evident from any collection of customary oaths. A single
instance, will show at once the combination of retributions in
and after the present life, and the tendency to heap up remote
penalties in the vain hope of securing present honesty. The
Siamese Buddhist in his oath, not content to call. down on himself
various kinds of death if he breaks it, desires that he may afterwards
be cast into hell to go through innumerable tortures,
among them to carry water over the flames in a wicker basket
to assuage the thirst of the infernal judge, then that he may
migrate into the body of a slave for as many years as there are
grains of sand in four seas, and after this that he may be born a
beast through five hundred generations and an hermaphrodite
five hundred more.
The forms of oath belonging to all nations and ages, various as they are in detail, come under a few general heads. It may be first observed that gestures such as grasping hands, or putting one hand between the hands of another in token of homage, are sometimes treated as of the nature of oaths, but wrongly so, they being rather of the nature of ceremonies of compact. The Hebrew practice of putting the hand under another’s thigh is usually reckoned among oath-rites, but it may have been merely a ceremony of covenant (Gen. xxiv. 2, xlvii. 29; see Joseph. Ant. i. 16). Even the covenant among many ancient and modern nations by the parties mixing their blood or drinking one another’s is in itself only a solemn rite of union, not an oath proper, unless some such ceremony is introduced as dipping weapons into the blood, as in the form among the ancient Scythians (Herod. iv. 70); this, by bringing in the idea of death befalling the covenant-breaker, converts the proceeding into an oath of the strongest kind. The custom of swearing by weapons, though frequent in the world, is far from consistent in meaning. It may signify, in cases such as those just mentioned, that the swearer if forsworn is to die by such a weapon; or the warrior may appeal to his weapon as a powerful or divine object, as Parthenopaeus swears by his spear that he will level to the ground the walls of Thebes (Aeschyl. Sept. contra Theb. 530; see the custom of the Quadi in Ammian. Marcellin. xvii.); or the weapon may be a divine emblem, as when the Scythians swore by the wind and the sword as denoting life and death (Lucian, Toxaris, 38). Oaths by weapons lasted into the Christian period; for instance, the Lombards swore lesser oaths by consecrated weapons and greater on the Gospels (see Du Cange, s.v. “Juramenta super arma”; Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterth. p. 896). Stretching forth the hand towards the object or deity sworn by is a natural gesture, well shown in the oath of Agamemnon, who with uplifted hands (Διῒ χεῖρας ἀνασχών) takes Heaven to witness with Sun and Earth and the Erinyes who below the earth wreak vengeance on the perjurer (Homer Il. xix. 254; see also Pindar, Olymp. vii. 120). The gesture of lifting the hand towards heaven was also an Israelite form of oath: Abraham says, “I have lifted up my hand to Jehovah,” while Jehovah Himself is represented as so swearing, “For I lift up My hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever” (Gen. xiv. 22; Deut. xxxii. 40; see Dan. xii. 7; Rev. x. 5). This gesture established itself in Christendom, and has continued to modern times. In England, for example, in the parliament at Shrewsbury in 1398, when the Lords took an oath on the cross of Canterbury never to suffer the transactions of that parliament to be changed, the members of the Commons held up their hands to signify their taking upon themselves the same oath (J. E. Tyler, Oaths, p. 99). In France a juror takes oath by raising his hand, saying, “Je jure!” The Scottish judicial oath is taken by the witness holding up his right hand uncovered, and repeating after the usher, “I swear by Almighty God, and as I shall answer to God at the great day of judgment, that I will,” &c.
In the ancient world sacrifice often formed part of the ceremony of the oath; typical examples may be found in the Homeric poems, as in Agamemnon’s oath already mentioned, or the compact between the Greeks and Trojans (Il. iii. 276), where wine is poured out in libation, with prayer to Zeus and the immortal gods that the perjurer’s brains shall, like the wine, be poured on the ground; the rite thus passes into a symbolic curse-oath of the ordinary barbaric type. Connected with such sacrificial oaths is the practice of laying the hand on the victim or the altar, or touching the image of the god.” A classic instance is in a comedy of Plautus (Rudens, v. 2, 45), where Gripus says, “Tange aram hanc Veneris,” and Labrax answers “Tango” (Greek instance, Thucyd. v. 47; see Justin xxiv. 2). Thus Livy (xxi. 1) introduces the phrase “touching the sacred objects” (tactis sacris) into the picturesque story of Hannibal’s oath. Details of the old Scandinavian oath have been preserved in Iceland in the Landnámabók (Islendinga Sögur, Copenhagen, 1843); a bracelet (baugr) of two rings or more was to be kept on the altar in every head court, which the godi or priest should wear at all law-things held by him, and should redden in the blood of the bullock sacrificed, the witness pronouncing the remarkable formula: “Name I to witness that I take oath by the ring, law-oath, so help me Frey, and Niörd, and almighty Thor” (hialpi mer svâ Freyr, ok Niördr, ok hinn almâttki Âss), &c. This was, doubtless the great oath on the holy ring or bracelet which the Danes swore to King Alfred to quit his kingdom (“on tham halgan beage,” Anglo-Sax. Chron.; “in eorum armilla sacra,” Ethelwerd, Chron. iv.). An oath, though not necessarily expressed in words, is usually so. In the Homeric
