Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/161

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
FETISHISM.
147

that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to take them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with it.[1] Among those strong believers in disease-spirits, the Dayaks of Borneo, the priest, waving and jingling charms over the affected part of the patient, pretends to extract stones, splinters, and bits of rag, which he declares are spirits; of such evil spirits he will occasionally bring half-a-dozen out of a man's stomach, and as he is paid a fee of six gallons of rice for each, he is probably disposed (like a chiropodist under similar circumstances) to extract a good many.[2] The most instructive accounts of this kind are those which reach us from Africa. Dr. Callaway has taken down at length a Zulu account of the method of stopping out disease caused by spirits of the dead. If a widow is troubled by her late husband's ghost coming and talking to her night after night as though still alive, till her health is affected and she begins to waste away, they find a 'nyanga' or sorcerer who can bar out the disease. He bids her not lose the spittle collected in her mouth while she is dreaming, and gives her medicine to chew when she wakes. Then he goes with her to lay the 'itongo,' or ghost; perhaps he shuts it up in a bulb of the inkomfe plant, making a hole in the side of this, putting in the medicine and the dream-spittle, closing the hole with a stopper, and replanting the bulb. Leaving the place, he charges her not to look back till she gets home. Thus the dream is barred; it may still come occasionally, but no longer infests the woman; the doctor prevails over the dead man as regards that dream. In other cases the cure of a sick man attacked by the ancestral spirits may be effected with some of his blood put into a hole in an anthill by the doctor, who closes the hole with a stone, and departs without looking back; or the patient may be scarified over the painful place, and the blood put into the mouth of a frog, caught for the purpose and carried back. So the disease is barred out from the

  1. Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.
  2. St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 211, see 72.