In the three more elaborate forms of the guest-removing operation just described the broom seems to be employed at present—whatever may have been its original purpose—to represent the person to be operated upon; the expressions used in the first and third of these forms, and the beckoning in the second, all indicate this. Magical operations in which the victim is represented by a puppet-image, or by a likeness of some other kind, which is injured with the intention that injury shall be caused thereby to fall upon the victim himself, are so well known in Japan[1] that a casual examination of these guest-removing majinai might easily tempt us to believe that they are essentially operations in which a representation of the guest is to be worked upon, and that the form of the majinai in which mimetic actions do not appear is a decadent one in which the main idea underlying the operation has been forgotten. But closer investigation seems to show that such is not the case, and that the simplest procedure is in reality more or less nearly in the original form, the others having acquired characters at first foreign to the operation. A proof of this seems to lie in the fact that in the guest-removing operations above cited the victim is always represented by an inverted broom, for there seems to be no reason why an inverted broom should be specified unless it be an essential part of the apparatus—the Japanese housewife has many kitchen utensils which, individually or combined with each other, could be used with equal facility and for the production of a greater likeness to a human being than that obtainable with an inverted broom, while often she has at hand paper upon which she can draw, or from which she can cut or twist, an unmistakable likeness of a human being. It would thus appear that the first matters for us to inquire into are the questions: Why
- ↑ For a number of examples of operations of this character, see "Notes on some Japanese Magical Methods for Injuring Persons," in Man, 1915, 65.
