Primitive Culture/Chapter 14

by Edward Burnett Tylor

 

CHAPTER XIV.

ANIMISM (continued).

Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider Doctrine of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural Religion — Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently modelled on that of Souls — Transition stage: classes of Souls passing into good and evil Demons — Manes-Worship — Doctrine of Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert bodies — Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and Oracle-inspiration — Fetishism — Disease-spirits embodied — Ghost attached to remains of Corpse — Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in, attached to, or operating through, an Object — Analogues of Fetish-doctrine in Modern Science — Stock-and-Stone Worship — Idolatry — Survival of Animistic Phraseology in modern Language — Decline of Animistic theory of Nature.

The general scheme of Animism, of which the doctrine of souls hitherto discussed forms part, thence expands to complete the full general philosophy of Natural Religion among mankind. Conformably with that early childlike philosophy in which human life seems the direct key to the understanding of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe refers its phenomena in general to the wilful action of pervading personal spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but the reasonable inference that effects are due to causes, which led the rude men of old days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own homes and haunts, and the vast earth and sky beyond. Spirits are simply personified causes. As men's ordinary life and actions were held to be caused by souls, so the happy or disastrous events which affect mankind, as well as the manifold physical operations of the outer-world, were accounted for as caused by soul-like beings, spirits whose essential similarity of origin is evident through all their wondrous variety of power and function. Much that the primitive animistic view thus explains, has been indeed given over by more advanced education to the 'metaphysical' and 'positive' stages of thought. Yet animism is still plainly to be traced onward from the intellectual state of the lower races, along the course of the higher culture, whether its doctrines have been continued and modified into the accepted philosophy of religion, or whether they have dwindled into mere survivals in popular superstition. Though all I here undertake is to sketch in outline such features of this spiritualistic philosophy as I can see plainly enough to draw at all, scarcely attempting to clear away the haze that covers great parts of the subject, yet even so much as I venture on is a hard task, made yet harder by the responsibility attaching to it. For it appears that to follow the course of animism on from its more primitive stages, is to account for much of mediæval and modern opinion whose meaning and reason could hardly be comprehended without the aid of a development-theory of culture, taking in the various processes of new formation, abolition, survival, and revival. Thus even the despised ideas of savage races become a practically important topic to the modern world, for here, as usual, whatever bears on the origin of philosophic opinion, bears also on its validity.

At this point of the investigation, we come fully into sight of the principle which has been all along implied in the use of the word Animism, in a sense beyond its narrower meaning of the doctrine of souls. By using it to express the doctrine of spirits generally, it is practically asserted that the idea of souls, demons, deities, and any other classes of spiritual beings, are conceptions of similar nature throughout, the conceptions of souls being the original ones of the series. It was best, from this point of view, to begin with a careful study of souls, which are the spirits proper to men, animals, and things, before extending the survey of the spirit-world to its fullest range. If it be admitted that souls and other spiritual beings are conceived of as essentially similar in their nature, it may be reasonably argued that the class of conceptions based on evidence most direct and accessible to ancient men, is the earlier and fundamental class. To grant this, is in effect to agree that the doctrine of souls, founded on the natural perceptions of primitive man, gave rise to the doctrine of spirits, which extends and modifies its general theory for new purposes, but in developments less authenticated and consistent, more fanciful and far-fetched. It seems as though the conception of a human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a type or model on which he framed not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but also his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit.

The doctrines of the lower races fully justify us in classing their spiritual beings in general as similar in nature to the souls of men. It will be incidentally shown here, again and again, that souls have the same qualities attributed to them as other spirits, are treated in like fashion, and pass without distinct breaks into every part of the general spiritual definition. The similar nature of soul and other spirit is, in fact, one of the commonplaces of animism, from its rudest to its most cultured stages. It ranges from the native New Zealanders' and West Indians' conceptions of the 'atua' and the 'cemi,' beings which require special definition to show whether they are human souls or demons or deities of some other class,^[1] and so onward to the declaration of Philo Judæus, that souls, demons, and angels differ indeed in name, but are in reality one,^[2] and to the state of mind of the modern Roman Catholic priest, who is cautioned in the rubric concerning the examination of a possessed patient, not to believe the demon if he pretends to be the soul of some saint or deceased person, or a good angel (neque ei credatur, si dæmon simularet se esse animam alicujus Sancti, vel defuncti, vel Angelum bonum).^[3] Nothing can bring more broadly into view the similar nature of souls and other spiritual beings than the existence of a full transitional series of ideas. Souls of dead men are in fact considered as actually forming one of the most important classes of demons and deities.

It is quite usual for savage tribes to live in terror of the souls of the dead as harmful spirits. Thus Australians have been known to consider the ghosts of the unburied dead as becoming malignant demons.^[4] New Zealanders have supposed the souls of their dead to become so changed in nature as to be malignant to their nearest and dearest friends in life;^[5] the Caribs said that, of man's various souls, some go to the seashore and capsize boats, others to the forest to be evil spirits;^[6] among the Sioux Indians the fear of a ghost's vengeance has been found to act as a check on murder;^[7] of some tribes in Central Africa it may be said that their main religious doctrine is the belief in ghosts, and that the main characteristic of these ghosts is to do harm to the living.^[8] The Patagonians lived in terror of the souls of their wizards, which become evil demons after death;^[9] Turanian tribes of North Asia fear their shamans even more when dead than when alive, for they become a special class of spirits who are the hurtfullest in all nature, and who among the Mongols plague the living on purpose to make them bring offerings.^[10] In China it is held that the multitudes of wretched destitute spirits in the world below, such as souls of lepers and beggars, can sorely annoy the living; therefore at certain times they are to be appeased with offerings of food, scant and beggarly; and a man who feels unwell, or fears a mishap in business, will prudently have some mock-clothing and mock-money burnt for these 'gentlemen of the lower regions.'^[11] Notions of this sort are widely prevalent in Indo-China and India; whole orders of demons there were formerly human souls, especially of people left unburied or slain by plague or violence, of bachelors or of women who died in childbirth, and who henceforth wreak their vengeance on the living. They may, however, be propitiated by temples and offerings, and thus have become in fact a regular class of local deities.^[12] Among them may be counted the diabolic soul of a certain wicked British officer, whom native worshippers in the Tinnevelly district still propitiate by offering at his grave the brandy and cheroots he loved in life.^[13] India even carried theory into practice by an actual manufacture of demons, as witness the two following accounts. A certain brahman, on whose lands a kshatriya raja had built a house, ripped himself up in revenge, and became a demon of the kind called brahmadasyu, who has been ever since the terror of the whole country, and is the most common village deity in Kharakpur.^[14] Toward the close of the last century there were two brahmans, out of whose house a man had wrongfully, as they thought, taken forty rupees; whereupon one of the brahmans proceeded to cut off his own mother's head, with the professed view, entertained by both mother and son, that her spirit, excited by the beating of a large drum during forty days, might haunt, torment, and pursue to death the taker of their money and those concerned with him. Declaring with her last words that she would blast the thief, the spiteful hag deliberately gave up her life to take ghostly vengeance for those forty rupees.^[15] By instances like these it appears that we may trace up from the psychology of the lower races the familiar ancient and modern European tales of baleful ghost-demons. The old fear even now continues to vouch for the old belief.

Happily for man's anticipation of death, and for the treatment of the sick and aged, thoughts of horror and hatred do not preponderate in ideas of deified ancestors, who are regarded on the whole as kindly patron spirits, at least to their own kinsfolk and worshippers. Manes-worship is one of the great branches of the religion of mankind. Its principles are not difficult to understand, for they plainly keep up the social relations of the living world. The dead ancestor, now passed into a deity, simply goes on protecting his own family and receiving suit and service from them as of old; the dead chief still watches over his own tribe, still holds his authority by helping friends and harming enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the wrong. It will be enough to show by a few characteristic examples the general position of manes-worship among mankind, from the lower culture upward.^[16] In the two Americas it appears not unfrequently, from the low savage level of the Brazilian Camacans, to the somewhat higher stage of northern Indian tribes whom we hear of as praying to the spirits of their forefathers for good weather or luck in hunting, and fancying when an Indian falls into the fire that the ancestral spirits pushed him in to punish neglect of the customary gifts, while the Natchez of Louisiana are said to have even gone so far as to build temples for dead men.^[17] Turning to the dark races of the Pacific, we find the Tasmanians laying their sick round a corpse on the funeral pile, that the dead might come in the night and take out the devils that caused the diseases; it is asserted in a general way of the natives, that they believed most implicitly in the return of the spirits of their departed friends or relations to bless or injure them as the case might be.^[18] In Tanna, the gods are spirits of departed ancestors, aged chiefs becoming deities after death, presiding over the growth of yams and fruit trees, and receiving from the islanders prayer and offerings of first fruits.^[19] Nor are the fairer Polynesians behind in this respect. Below the great mythological gods of Tonga and New Zealand, the souls of chiefs and warriors form a lower but active and powerful order of deities, who in the Tongan paradise intercede for man's benefit with the higher deities, who direct the Maori war parties on the march, hover over them and give them courage in the fight, and, watching jealously their own tribes and families, punish any violation of the sacred laws of tapu.^[20] Thence we trace the doctrine into the Malay islands, where the souls of deceased ancestors are looked to for prosperity in life and help in distress.^[21] In Madagascar, the worship of the spirits of the dead is remarkably associated with the Vazimbas, the aborigines of the island, who are said still to survive as a distinct race in the interior, and whose peculiar graves testify to their former occupancy of other districts. These graves, small in size, and distinguished by a cairn and an upright stone slab or altar, are places which the Malagasy regard with equal fear and veneration, and their faces become sad and serious when they even pass near. To take a stone or pluck a twig from one of these graves, to stumble against one in the dark, would be resented by the angry Vazimba inflicting disease, or coming in the night to carry off the offender to the region of ghosts. The Malagasy is thus enabled to account for every otherwise unaccountable ailment by his having knowingly or unknowingly given offence to some Vazimba. They are not indeed always malevolent, they may be placable or implacable, or partake of both characters. Thus it comes to pass, that at the altar-slab which long ago some rude native family set up for commemoration or dutiful offering of food to a dead kinsman, a barbaric supplanting race now comes to smear the burnt fat of sacrifice, and set up the heads of poultry and sheep and the horns of bullocks, that the mysterious tenant may be kind, not cruel, with his superhuman powers.^[22]

On the continent of Africa, manes-worship appears with extremest definiteness and strength. Thus Zulu warriors, aided by the 'amatongo,' the spirits of their ancestors, conquer in the battle; but if the dead turn their backs on the living, the living fall in the fight, to become ancestral spirits in their turn. In anger the 'itongo' seizes a living man's body and inflicts disease and death; in beneficence he gives health, and cattle, and corn, and all men wish. Even the little children and old women, of small account in life, become at death spirits having much power, the infants for kindness, the crones for malice. But it is especially the head of each family who receives the worship of his kin. Why it is naturally and reasonably so, a Zulu thus explains. 'Although they worship the many Amatongo of their tribe, making a great fence around them for their protection; yet their father is far before all others when they worship the Amatongo. Their father is a great treasure to them even when he is dead. And those of his children who are already grown up know him thoroughly, his gentleness, and his bravery.' 'Black people do not worship all Amatongo indifferently, that is, all the dead of their tribe. Speaking generally, the head of each house is worshipped by the children of that house; for they do not know the ancients who are dead, nor their laud-giving names, nor their names. But their father whom they knew is the head by whom they begin and end in their prayer, for they know him best, and his love for his children; they remember his kindness to them whilst he was living; they compare his treatment of them whilst he was living, support themselves by it, and say, "He will still treat us in the same way now he is dead. We do not know why he should regard others besides us; he will regard us only."'^[23] It will be seen in another place how the Zulu follows up the doctrine of divine ancestors till he reaches a first ancestor of man and creator of the world, the primæval Unkulunkulu. In West Africa, manes-worship displays in contrast its two special types. On the one hand, we see the North Guinea negroes transferring the souls of the dead, according to their lives, to the rank of good and evil spirits, and if evil worshipping them the more zealously, as fear is to their minds a stronger impulse than love. On the other hand, in Southern Guinea, we see the deep respect paid to the aged during life, passing into worship when death has raised them to yet higher influence. There the living bring to the images of the dead food and drink, and even a small portion of their profits gained in trade; they look especially to dead relatives for help in the trials of life, and 'it is no uncommon thing to see large groups of men and women, in times of peril or distress, assembled along the brow of some commanding eminence, or along the skirts of some dense forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon the spirits of their ancestors.'^[24]

In Asia, manes-worship comes to the surface in all directions. The rude Veddas of Ceylon believe in the guardianship of the spirits of the dead ; these, they say, are 'ever watchful, coming to them in sickness, visiting them in dreams, giving them flesh when hunting;' and in every calamity and want they call for aid on the 'kindred spirits,' and especially the shades of departed children, the 'infant spirits.'^[25] Among non-Hindu tribes of India, whose religions more or less represent præ-Brahmanic and præ-Buddhistic conditions, wide and deep traces appear of an ancient and surviving cultus of ancestors.^[26] Among Turanian tribes spread over the northern regions of the Old World, a similar state of things may be instanced from the Mongols, worshipping as good deities the princely souls of Genghis Khan's family, at whose head stands the divine Genghis himself.^[27] Nor have nations of the higher Asiatic culture generally rejected the time-honoured rite. In Japan the 'Way of the Kami,' better known to foreigners as the Sin-tu religion, is one of the officially recognized faiths, and in it there is still kept up in hut and palace the religion of the rude old mountain-tribes of the land, who worshipped their divine ancestors, the Kami, and prayed to them for help and blessing. To the time of these ancient Kami, say the modern Japanese, the rude stone implements belong which are found in the ground in Japan as elsewhere: to modern ethnologists, however, these bear witness not of divine but savage parentage.^[28] In Siam the lower orders scruple to worship the great gods, lest through ignorance they should blunder in the complex ritual; they prefer to pray to the 'theparak,' a lower class of deities among whom the souls of great men take their places at death.^[29] In China, as every one knows, ancestor-worship is the dominant religion of the land, and interesting problems are opened out to the Western mind by the spectacle of a great people who for thousands of years have been thus seeking the living among the dead. Nowhere is the connexion between parental authority and conservatism more graphically shown. The worship of ancestors, begun during their life, is not interrupted but intensified when death makes them deities. The Chinese, prostrate bodily and mentally before the memorial tablets that contain the souls of his ancestors, little thinks that he is all the while proving to mankind how vast a power unlimited filial obedience, prohibiting change from ancestral institutions, may exert in stopping the advance of civilization. The thought of the souls of the dead as sharing the happiness and glory of their descendants is one which widely pervades the world, but most such ideas would seem vague and weak to the Chinese, who will try hard for honour in his competitive examination with the special motive of glorifying his dead ancestors, and whose titles of rank will raise his deceased father and grandfather a grade above himself, as though, with us, Zachary Macaulay and Copley the painter should now have viscounts' coronets officially placed on their tombstones. As so often happens, what is jest to one people is sober sense to another. There are 300 millions of Chinese who would hardly see a joke in Charles Lamb reviling the stupid age that would not read him, and declaring that he would write for antiquity. Had he been a Chinese himself, he might have written his book in all seriousness for the benefit of his great-great-grand-father. Among the Chinese, manes-worship is no rite of mere affection. The living want the help of the ancestral spirits, who reward virtue and punish vice: 'The exalted ancestor will bring thee, O Prince, much good!' — 'Ancestors and fathers will abandon you and give you up, and come not to help, and ye will die.' If no help comes in time of need, the Chinese will reproach his ancestor, or even come to doubt his existence. Thus in a Chinese ode the sufferers in a dreadful drought cry, 'Heu-tsi cannot or will not help. ... Our ancestors have surely perished. ... Father, mother, ancestors, how could you calmly bear this?' Nor does manes-worship stop short with direct family ties; it is naturally developed to produce, by deification of the heroic dead, a series of superior gods to whom worship is given by the public at large. Thus, according to legend, the War-god or Military Sage was once in human life a distinguished soldier, the Mechanics' god was a skilful workman and inventor of tools, the Swine-god was a hog-breeder who lost his pigs and died of sorrow, and the Gamblers' god, a desperate gamester who lost his all and died of want, is represented by a hideous image called a 'devil gambling for cash,' and in this shape receives the prayers and offerings of confirmed gamblers, his votaries. The spirits of San-kea Ta-te, and Chang-yuen-sze go to partake of the offerings set out in their temples, returning flushed and florid from their meal; and the spirit of Confucius is present in the temple, where twice a year the Emperor does sacrifice to him.^[30]

The Hindu unites in some degree with the Chinese as to ancestor-worship, and especially as to the necessity of having a son by blood or adoption, who shall offer the proper sacrifices to him after death. 'May there be born in our lineage,' the manes are supposed to say, 'a man to offer to us, on the thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and ghee.' Offerings made to the divine manes, the 'pitaras' (patres, fathers) as they are called, preceded and followed by offerings to the greater deities, give to the worshipper merit and happiness.^[31] In classic Europe, apotheosis lies part within the limits of myth, where it was applied to fabled ancestors, and part within the limits of actual history, as where Julius and Augustus shared its honours with the vile Domitian and Commodus. The most special representatives of ancestor-worship in Europe were perhaps the ancient Romans, whose word 'manes' has become the recognized name for ancestral deities in modern civilized language; they embodied them as images, set them up as household patrons, gratified them with offerings and solemn homage, and counting them as or among the infernal gods, inscribed on tombs D. M., 'Diis Manibus.'^[32] The occurrence of this D. M. in Christian epitaphs is an often-noticed case of religious survival.

Although full ancestor-worship is not practised in modern Christendom, there remains even now within its limits a well-marked worship of the dead. A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now form an order of inferior deities, active in the affairs of men and receiving from them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the definition of manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging in principle to the older manes-worship, was adapted to answer another purpose in the course of religious transition in Europe. The local gods, the patron gods of particular ranks and crafts, the gods from whom men sought special help in special needs, were too near and dear to the inmost heart of præ-Christian Europe to be done away with without substitutes. It proved easier to replace them by saints who could undertake their particular professions, and even succeed them in their sacred dwellings. The system of spiritual division of labour was in time worked out with wonderful minuteness in the vast array of professional saints, among whom the most familiar to modern English ears are St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians; St. Luke, patron of painters; St. Peter, of fishmongers; St. Valentine, of lovers; St. Sebastian, of archers; St. Crispin, of cobblers; St. Hubert, who cures the bite of mad dogs; St. Vitus, who delivers madmen and sufferers from the disease which bears his name; St. Fiacre, whose name is now less known by his shrine than by the hackney-coaches called after him in the seventeenth century. Not to dwell here minutely on an often-treated topic, it will be enough to touch on two particular points. First, as to the direct historical succession of the Christian saint to the heathen deity, the following are two very perfect illustrations. It is well known that Romulus, mindful of his own adventurous infancy, became after death a Roman deity propitious to the health and safety of young children, so that nurses and mothers would carry sickly infants to present them in his little round temple at the foot of the Palatine. In after ages the temple was replaced by the church of St. Theodorus, and there Dr. Conyers Middleton, who drew public attention to its curious history, used to look in and see ten or a dozen women, each with a sick child in her lap, sitting in silent reverence before the altar of the saint. The ceremony of blessing children, especially after vaccination, may still be seen there on Thursday mornings.^[33] Again, Sts. Cosmas and Damianus, according to Maury, owe their recognized office to a similar curious train of events. They were martyrs who suffered under Diocletian, at Ægææ in Cilicia. Now this place was celebrated for the worship of Æsculapius, in whose temple incubation, i.e. sleeping for oracular dreams, was practised. It seems as though the idea was transferred on the spot to the two local saints, for we next hear of them as appearing in a dream to the Emperor Justinian, when he was ill at Byzantium. They cured him, he built them a temple, their cultus spread far and wide, and they frequently appeared to the sick to show them what they should do. Legend settled that Cosmas and Damianus were physicians while they lived on earth, and at any rate they are patron-saints of the profession of medicine to this day.^[34] Second, as to the actual state of hagiolatry in modern Europe, it is obvious on a broad view that it is declining among the educated classes. Yet modern examples may be brought forward to show ideas as extreme as those which prevailed more widely a thousand years ago. In the Church of the Jesuit College at Rome lies buried St. Aloysius Gonzaga, on whose festival it is customary especially for the college students to write letters to him, which are placed on his gaily decorated and illuminated altar, and afterwards burnt unopened. The miraculous answering of these letters is vouched for in an English book of 1870. To the same year belongs an English tract commemorating a late miraculous cure. An Italian lady afflicted with a tumour and incipient cancer of the breast was exhorted by a Jesuit priest to recommend herself to the Blessed John Berchmans, a pious Jesuit novice from Belgium, who died in 1621, and was beatified in 1865. Her adviser procured for her 'three small packets of dust gathered from the coffin of this saintly innocent, a little cross made of the boards of the room the blessed youth occupied, as well as some portion of the wadding in which his venerable head was wrapped.' During nine days' devotion the patient accordingly invoked the Blessed John, swallowed small portions of his dust in water, and at last pressed the cross to her breast so vehemently that she was seized with sickness, went to sleep, and awoke without a symptom of the complaint. And when Dr. Panegrossi the physician beheld the incredible cure, and heard that the patient had addressed herself to the Blessed Berchmans, he bowed his head, saying, 'When such physicians interfere, we have nothing more to say!'^[35] To sum up the whole history of manes-worship, it is plain that in our time the dead still receive worship from far the larger half of mankind, and it may have been much the same ever since the remote periods of primitive culture in which the religion of the manes probably took its rise.

It has now been seen that the theory of souls recognizes them as capable either of independent existence, or of inhabiting human, animal, or other bodies. On the principle here maintained, that the general theory of spirits is modelled on the theory of souls, we shall be able to account for several important branches of the lower philosophy of religion, which without such explanation may appear in great measure obscure or absurd. Like souls, other spirits are supposed able either to exist and act flitting free about the world, or to become incorporate for more or less time in solid bodies. It will be well at once to get a secure grasp of this theory of Embodiment, for without it we shall be stopped every moment by a difficulty in understanding the nature of spirits, as defined in the lower animism. The theory of embodiment serves several highly important purposes in savage and barbarian philosophy. On the one hand it provides an explanation of the phenomena of morbid exaltation and derangement, especially as connected with abnormal utterance, and this view is so far extended as to produce an almost general doctrine of disease. On the other hand, it enables the savage either to 'lay' a hurtful spirit in some foreign body, and so get rid of it, or to carry about a useful spirit for his service in a material object, to set it up as a deity for worship in the body of an animal, or in a block or stone or image or other thing, which contains the spirit as a vessel contains a fluid: this is the key to strict fetishism, and in no small measure to idolatry. In briefly considering these various branches of the Embodiment-theory, there may be conveniently included certain groups of cases often impossible to distinguish apart. These cases belong theoretically rather to obsession than possession, the spirits not actually inhabiting the bodies, but hanging or hovering about them and affecting them from the outside.

As in normal conditions the man's soul, inhabiting his body, is held to give it life, to think, speak, and act through it, so an adaptation of the self-same principle explains abnormal conditions of body or mind, by considering the new symptoms as due to the operation of a second soul-like being, a strange spirit. The possessed man, tossed and shaken in fever, pained and wrenched as though some live creature were tearing or twisting him within, pining as though it were devouring his vitals day by day, rationally finds a personal spiritual cause for his sufferings. In hideous dreams he may even sometimes see the very ghost or nightmare-fiend that plagues him. Especially when the mysterious unseen power throws him helpless on the ground, jerks and writhes him in convulsions, makes him leap upon the bystanders with a giant's strength and a wild beast's ferocity, impels him, with distorted face and frantic gesture, and voice not his own nor seemingly even human, to pour forth wild incoherent raving, or with thought and eloquence beyond his sober faculties to command, to counsel, to foretell — such a one seems to those who watch him, and even to himself, to have become the mere instrument of a spirit which has seized him or entered into him, a possessing demon in whose personality the patient believes so implicitly that he often imagines a personal name for it, which it can declare when it speaks in its own voice and character through his organs of speech; at last, quitting the medium's spent and jaded body, the intruding spirit departs as it came. This is the savage theory of dæmoniacal possession and obsession, which has been for ages, and still remains, the dominant theory of disease and inspiration among the lower races. It is obviously based on an animistic interpretation, most genuine and rational in its proper place in man's intellectual history, of the actual symptoms of the cases. The general doctrine of disease-spirits and oracle-spirits appears to have its earliest, broadest, and most consistent position within the limits of savagery. When we have gained a clear idea of it in this its original home, we shall be able to trace it along from grade to grade of civilization, breaking away piecemeal under the influence of new medical theories, yet sometimes expanding in revival, and at least in lingering survival holding its place into the midst of our modern life. The possession-theory is not merely known to us by the statements of those who describe diseases in accordance with it. Disease being accounted for by attack of spirits, it naturally follows that to get rid of these spirits is the proper means of cure. Thus the practices of the exorcist appear side by side with the doctrine of possession, from its first appearance in savagery to its survival in modern civilization; and nothing could display more vividly the conception of a disease or a mental affection as caused by a personal spiritual being than the proceedings of the exorcist who talks to it, coaxes or threatens it, makes offerings to it, entices or drives it out of the patient's body, and induces it to take up its abode in some other. That the two great effects ascribed to such spiritual influence in obsession and possession, namely, the infliction of ailments and the inspiration of oracles, are not only mixed up together but often run into absolute coincidence, accords with the view that both results are referred to one common cause. Also that the intruding or invading spirit may be either a human soul or may belong to some other class in the spiritual hierarchy, countenances the opinion that the possession-theory is derived from, and indeed modelled on, the ordinary theory of the soul acting on the body. In illustrating the doctrine by typical examples from the enormous mass of available details, it will hardly be possible to discriminate among the operating spirits, between those which are souls and those which are demons, nor to draw an exact line between obsession by a demon outside and possession by a demon inside, nor between the condition of the demon-tormented patient and the demon-actuated doctor, seer, or priest. In a word, the confusion of these conceptions in the savage mind only fairly represents their intimate connexion in the Possession-theory itself.

In the Australian-Tasmanian district, disease and death are ascribed to more or less defined spiritual influences; descriptions of a demon working a sorcerer's wicked will by coming slyly behind his victim and hitting him with his club on the back of his neck, and of a dead man's ghost angered by having his name uttered, and creeping up into the utterer's body to consume his liver, are indeed peculiarly graphic details of savage animism.^[36] The theory of disease-spirits is well stated in its extreme form among the Mintira, a low race of the Malay peninsula. Their 'hantu' or spirits have among their functions that of causing ailments; thus the 'hantu kalumbahan' causes small-pox; the 'hantu kamang' brings on inflammation and swellings in the hands and feet; when a person is wounded, the 'hantu pari' fastens on the wound and sucks, and this is the cause of the blood flowing. And thus, as the describer says, 'To enumerate the remainder of the hantus would be merely to convert the name of every species of disease known to the Mintira into a proper one. If any new disease appeared, it would be ascribed to a hantu bearing the same name.'^[37] It will help us to an idea of the distinct personality which the disease-demon has in the minds of the lower races, to notice the Orang Laut of this district placing thorns and brush in the paths leading to a part where small-pox had broken out, to keep the demons off; just as the Khonds of Orissa try with thorns, and ditches, and stinking oil poured on the ground, to barricade the paths to their hamlets against the goddess of small-pox, Jugah Pennu.^[38] Among the Dayaks of Borneo, 'to have been smitten by a spirit' is to be ill; sickness may be caused by invisible spirits inflicting invisible wounds with invisible spears, or entering men's bodies and driving out their souls, or lodging in their hearts and making them raving mad. In the Indian Archipelago, the personal semi-human nature of the disease-spirits is clearly acknowledged by appeasing them with feasts and dances and offerings of food set out for them away in the woods, to induce them to quit their victims, or by sending tiny proas to sea with offerings, that spirits which have taken up their abode in sick men's bowels may embark and not come back.^[39] The animistic theory of disease is strongly marked in Polynesia, where every sickness is ascribed to spiritual action of deities, brought on by the offerings of enemies, or by the victim's violation of the laws of tapu. Thus in New Zealand each ailment is caused by a spirit, particularly an infant or undeveloped human spirit, which sent into the patient's body gnaws and. feeds inside; and the exorcist, finding the path by which such a disease-spirit came from below to feed on the vitals of a sick relative, will persuade it by a charm to get upon a flax-stalk and set off home. We hear, too, of an idea of the parts of the body — forehead, breast, stomach, feet, &c. — being apportioned each to a deity who inflicts aches and pains and ailments there.^[40] So in the Samoan group, when a man was near death, people were anxious to part on good terms with him, feeling assured that if he died with angry feelings towards any one, he would certainly return and bring calamity on that person or some one closely allied to him. This was considered a frequent source of disease and death, the spirit of a departed member of the family returning and taking up his abode in the head, chest, or stomach of a living man, and so causing sickness and death. If a man died suddenly, it was thought that he was eaten by the spirit that took him; and though the soul of one thus devoured would go to the common spirit-land of the departed, yet it would have no power of speech there, and if questioned could but beat its breast. It completes this account to notice that the disease-inflicting souls of the departed were the same which possessed the living under more favourable circumstances, coming to talk through a certain member of the family, prophesying future events, and giving directions as to family affairs.^[41] Farther east, in the Georgian and Society Islands, evil demons are sent to scratch and tear people into convulsions and hysterics, to torment poor wretches as with barbed hooks, or to twist and knot inside them till they die writhing in agony. But madmen are to be treated with great respect, as entered by a god, and idiots owe the kindness with which they are appeased and coaxed to the belief in their superhuman inspiration.^[42] Here, and elsewhere in the lower culture, the old real belief has survived which has passed into a jest of civilized men in the famous phrase of the 'inspired idiot.'

American ethnography carries on the record of rude races ascribing disease to the action of evil spirits. Thus the Dacotas believe that the spirits punish them for misconduct, especially for neglecting to make feasts for the dead; these spirits have the power to send the spirit of something, as of a bear, deer, turtle, fish, tree, stone, worm, or deceased person, which entering the patient causes disease; the medicine-man's cure consists in reciting charms over him, singing 'He-le-li-lah, &c.,' to the accompaniment of a gourd-rattle with beads inside, ceremonially shooting a symbolic bark representation of the intruding creature, sucking over the seat of pain to get the spirit out, and firing guns at it as it is supposed to be escaping.^[43] Such processes were in full vogue in the West Indies in the time of Columbus, when Friar Roman Pane put on record his quaint account of the native sorcerer pulling the disease off the patient's legs (as one pulls off a pair of trousers), going out of doors to blow it away, and bidding it begone to the mountain or the sea; the performance concluding with the regular sucking-cure and the pretended extraction of some stone or bit of flesh, or .such thing, which the patient is assured that his patron-spirit or deity (cemi) put into him to cause the disease, in punishment for neglect to build him a temple or honour him with prayer or offerings of goods.^[44] Patagonians considered sickness as caused by a spirit entering the patient's body; 'they believe every sick person to be possessed of an evil demon; hence their physicians always carry a drum with figures of devils painted on it, which they strike at the beds of sick persons to drive out from the body the evil demon which causes the disorder.'^[45] In Africa, according to the philosophy of the Basutos and the Zulus, the causes of disease are the ghosts of the dead, come to draw the living to themselves, or to compel them to sacrifice meat-offerings. They are recognized by the diviners, or by the patient himself, who sees in dreams the departed spirit come to torment him. Congo tribes in like manner consider the souls of the dead, passed into the ranks of powerful spirits, to cause disease and death among mankind. Thus, in both these districts, medicine becomes an almost entirely religious matter of propitiatory sacrifice and prayer addressed to the disease-inflicting manes. The Barolong give a kind of worship to deranged persons, as being under the direct influence of a deity; while in East Africa the explanation of madness and idiocy is simple and typical — 'he has fiends.'^[46] Negroes of West Africa, on the supposition that an attack of illness has been caused by some spiritual being, can ascertain to their satisfaction what manner of spirit has done it, and why. The patient may have neglected his 'wong' or fetish-spirit, who has therefore made him ill; or it may be his own 'kla' or personal guardian-spirit, who on being summoned explains that he has not been treated respectfully enough, &c.; or it may be a 'sisa' or ghost of some dead man, who has taken this means of making known that he wants perhaps a gold ornament that was left behind when he died.^[47] Of course, the means of cure will then be to satisfy the demands of the spirit. Another aspect of the negro doctrine of disease-spirits is displayed in the following description from Guinea, by the Rev. J. L. Wilson, the missionary: — 'Demoniacal possessions are common, and the feats performed by those who are supposed to be under such influence are certainly not unlike those described in the New Testament. Frantic gestures, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, feats of supernatural strength, furious ravings, bodily lacerations, gnashing of teeth, and other things of a similar character, may be witnessed in most of the cases which are supposed to be under diabolical influence.'^[48] The remark several times made by travellers is no doubt true, that the spiritualistic theory of disease has tended strongly to prevent progress in the medical art among the lower races. Thus among the Bodo and Dhimal of North-East India, who ascribe all diseases to a deity tormenting the patient for some impiety or neglect, the exorcists divine the offended god and appease him with the promised sacrifice of a hog; these exorcists are a class of priests, and the people have no other doctors.^[49] Where the world-wide doctrine of disease-demons has held sway, men's minds, full of spells and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs and regimen.

The cases in which disease-possession passes into oracle-possession are especially connected with hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections. Mr. Backhouse describes a Tasmanian native sorcerer, 'affected with fits of spasmodic contraction of the muscles of one breast, which he attributes, as they do all other diseases, to the devil'; this malady served to prove his inspiration to his people.^[50] When Dr. Mason was preaching near a village of heathen Pwo, a man fell down in an epileptic fit, his familiar spirit having come over him to forbid the people to listen to the missionary, and he sang out his denunciations like one frantic. This man was afterwards converted, and told the missionary that 'he could not account for his former exercises, but that it certainly appeared to him as though a spirit spoke, and he must tell what was communicated.' In this Karen district flourishes the native 'wee' or prophet, whose business is to work himself into the state in which he can see departed spirits, visit their distant home, and even recall them to the body, thus raising the dead; these wees are nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums, and in giving oracles they go into actual convulsions.^[51] Dr. Callaway's details of the state of the Zulu diviners are singularly instructive. Their symptoms are ascribed to possession by 'amatongo' or ancestral spirits; the disease is common, from some it departs of its own accord, others have the ghost laid which causes it, and others let the affection take its course and become professional diviners, whose powers of finding hidden things and giving apparently inaccessible information are vouched for by native witnesses, who at the same time are not blind to their tricks and their failures. The most perfect description is that of a hysterical visionary, who had 'the disease which precedes the power to divine.' This man describes that well-known symptom of hysteria, the heavy weight creeping up within him to his shoulders, his vivid dreams, his waking visions of objects that are not there when he approaches, the songs that come to him without learning, the sensation of flying in the air. This man was 'of a family who are very sensitive, and become doctors.'^[52] Persons whose constitutional unsoundness induces morbid manifestations are indeed marked out by nature to become seers and sorcerers. Among the Patagonians, patients seized with falling sickness or St. Vitus's dance were at once selected for magicians, as chosen by the demons themselves who possessed, distorted, and convulsed them.^[53] Among Siberian tribes, the shamans select children liable to convulsions as suitable to be brought up to the profession, which is apt to become hereditary with the epileptic tendencies it belongs to.^[54] Thus, even in the lower culture, a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts begin to have that power over the minds of their lustier fellows, which they have kept in so remarkable a way through the course of history.

Morbid oracular manifestations are habitually excited on purpose, and moreover the professional sorcerer commonly exaggerates or wholly feigns them. In the more genuine manifestations the medium may be so intensely wrought upon by the idea that a possessing spirit is speaking from within him, that he may not only give this spirit's name and speak in its character, but possibly may in good faith alter his voice to suit the spiritual utterance. This gift of spirit-utterance, which belongs to 'ventriloquism' in the ancient and proper sense of the term, of course lapses into sheer trickery. But that the phenomena should be thus artificially excited or dishonestly counterfeited, rather confirms than alters the present argument. Real or simulated, the details of oracle-possession alike illustrate popular belief. The Patagonian wizard begins his performance with drumming and rattling till the real or pretended epileptic fit comes on by the demon entering him, who then answers questions from within him with a faint and mournful voice.^[55] In Southern India and Ceylon the so-called 'devil-dancers' have to work themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspiration whereby they profess to cure their patients.^[56] So, with furious dancing to the music and chanting of the attendants, the Bodo priest brings on the fit of maniacal inspiration in which the deity fills him and gives oracles through him.^[57] In Kamchatka the female shamans, when Billukai came down into them in a thunderstorm, would prophesy ; or, receiving spirits with a cry of 'hush!' their teeth chattered as in fever, and they were ready to divine.^[58] Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the 'natzo' or conjurer is sent for to a sick patient, he calls on his 'nat' or demon, the soul of a deceased foreign prince, who descends into him and gives the required answers.^[59] In the Pacific Islands, spirits of the dead would enter for a time the body of a living man, inspiring him to declare future events, or to execute some commission from the higher deities. The symptoms of oracular possession among savages have been especially well described in this region of the world. The Fijian priest sits looking steadfastly at a whale's tooth ornament, amid dead silence. In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs come on, which increase to strong convulsions, with swelling of the veins, murmurs and sobs. Now the god has entered him, and with eyes rolling and protruding, unnatural voice, pale face and livid lips, sweat streaming from every pore, and the whole aspect of a furious madman, he gives the divine answer, and then, the symptoms subsiding, he looks round with a vacant stare, and the deity returns to the land of spirits. In the Sandwich Islands, where the god Oro thus gave his oracles, his priest ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but with his limbs convulsed, his features distorted and terrific, his eyes wild and strained, he would roll on the ground foaming at the mouth, and reveal the will of the possessing god in shrill cries and sounds violent and indistinct, which the attending priests duly interpreted to the people. In Tahiti, it was often noticed that men who in the natural state showed neither ability nor eloquence, would in such convulsive delirium burst forth into earnest lofty declamation, declaring the will and answers of the gods, and prophesying future events, in well-knit harangues full of the poetic figure and metaphor of the professional orator. But when the fit was over, and sober reason returned, the prophet's gifts were gone.^[60] Lastly, the accounts of oracular possession in Africa show the primitive ventriloquist in perfect types of morbid knavery. In Sofala, after a king's funeral, his soul would enter into a sorcerer, and speaking in the familiar tones that all the bystanders recognized, would give counsel to the new monarch how to govern his people.^[61] About a century ago, a negro fetish-woman of Guinea is thus described in the act of answering an enquirer who has come to consult her. She is crouching on the earth, with her head between her knees and her hands up to her face, till, becoming inspired by the fetish, she snorts and foams and gasps. Then the suppliant may put his question, 'Will my friend or brother get well of this sickness?' — 'What shall I give thee to set him free from his sickness?' and so forth. Then the fetish-woman answers in a thin, whistling voice, and with the old-fashioned idioms of generations past; and thus the suppliant receives his command, perhaps to kill a white cock and put him at a four-cross way, or tie him up for the fetish to come and fetch him, or perhaps merely to drive a dozen wooden pegs into the ground, so to bury his friend's disease with them.^[62]

The details of demoniacal possession among barbaric and civilized nations need no elaborate description, so simply do they continue the savage cases.^[63] But the state of things we notice here agrees with the conclusion that the possession-theory belongs originally to the lower culture, and is gradually superseded by higher medical knowledge. Surveying its course through the middle and higher civilization, we shall notice first a tendency to limit it to certain peculiar and severe affections, especially connected with mental disorder, such as epilepsy, hysteria, delirium, idiocy, madness; and after this a tendency to abandon it altogether, in consequence of the persistent opposition of the medical faculty. Among the nations of South-East Asia, obsession and possessions by demons is strong at least in popular belief. The Chinese attacked with dizziness, or loss of the use of his limbs, or other unaccountable disease, knows that he has been influenced by a malignant demon, or punished for some offence by a deity whose name he will mention, or affected by his wife of a former existence, whose spirit has after a long search discovered him. Exorcism of course exists, and when the evil spirit or influence is expelled, it is especially apt to enter some person standing near; hence the common saying, 'idle spectators should not be present at an exorcism.' Divination by possessed mediums is usual in China: among such is the professional woman who sits at a table in contemplation, till the soul of a deceased person from whom communication is desired enters her body and talks through her to the living; also the man into whom a deity is brought by invocations and mesmeric passes, when, assuming the divine figure and attitude, he pronounces the oracle.^[64] In Burma, the fever-demon of the jungle seizes trespassers on his domain, and shakes them in ague till he is exorcised, while falls and apoplectic fits are the work of other spirits. The dancing of women by demoniacal possession is treated by the doctor covering their heads with a garment, and thrashing them soundly with a stick, the demon and not the patient being considered to feel the blows; the possessing spirit may be prevented from escaping by a knotted and charmed cord hung round the bewitched person's neck, and when a sufficient beating has induced it to speak by the patient's voice and declare its name and business, it may either be allowed to depart, or the doctor tramples on the patient's stomach till the demon is stamped to death. For an example of invocation and offerings, one characteristic story told by Dr. Bastian will suffice. A Bengali cook was seized with an apoplectic fit, which his Burmese wife declared was but a just retribution, for the godless fellow had gone day after day to market to buy pounds and pounds of meat, yet in spite of her remonstrances would never give a morsel to the patron-spirit of the town; as a good wife, however, she now did her best for her suffering husband, placing near him little heaps of coloured rice for the 'nat,' and putting on his fingers rings with prayers addressed to the same offended being—'Oh ride him not!'—'Ah let him go!'—'Grip him not so hard!'—'Thou shalt have rice!'—'Ah, how good that tastes!' How explicitly Buddhism recognizes such ideas, may be judged from one of the questions officially put to candidates for admission as monks or talapoins—'Art thou afflicted by madness or the other ills caused by giants, witches, or evil demons of the forest and mountain?'^[65] Within our own domain of British India, the possession-theory and the rite of exorcism belonging to it may be perfectly studied to this day. There the doctrine of sudden ailment or nervous disease being due to a blast or possession by a 'bhut,' or being, that is, a demon, is recognized as of old; there the old witch who has possessed a man and made him sick or deranged, will answer spiritually out of his body and say who she is and where she lives; there the frenzied demoniac may be seen raving, writhing, tearing, bursting his bonds, till, subdued by the exorcist, his fury subsides, he stares and sighs, falls helpless to the ground, and comes to himself; and there the deities caused by excitement, singing, and incense to enter into men's bodies, manifest their presence with the usual hysterical or epileptic symptoms, and speaking in their own divine name and personality, deliver oracles by the vocal organs of the inspired medium.^[66]

In the Ancient Babylonian- Assyrian texts, the exorcism-formulas show the doctrine of disease-demons in full development, and similar opinions were current in ancient Greece and Rome, to whose languages indeed our own owes the technical terms of the subject, such as 'demoniac' and 'exorcist.' Homer's sick men racked with pain are tormented by a hateful demon ((Greek characters)). 'Epilepsy' ((Greek characters)) was, as its name imports, the 'seizure' of the patient by a superhuman agent: the agent being more exactly denned in 'nympholepsy,' the state of being seized or possessed by a nymph, i.e., rapt or entranced ((Greek characters), lymphatus). The causation of mental derangement and delirious utterance by spiritual possession was an accepted tenet of Greek philosophy. To be insane was simply to have an evil spirit, as when Sokrates said of those who denied demonic or spiritual knowledge, that they themselves were demoniac ((Greek characters)), and Alexander ascribed to the influence of offended Dionysos the ungovernable drunken fury in which he killed his friend Kleitos; raving madness was obsession or possession by an evil demon ((Greek characters)). So the Romans called madmen 'larvati,' 'larvarum pleni,' full of ghosts. Patients possessed by demons stared and foamed, and the spirits spoke from within them by their voices. The craft of the exorcist was well known. As for oracular possession, its theory and practice remained in fullest vigour through the classic world, scarce altered from the times of lowest barbarism. Could a South Sea Islander have gone to Delphi to watch the convulsive struggles of the Pythia, and listen to her raving, shrieking utterances, he would have needed no explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity with his own savage philosophy.^[67]

The Jewish doctrine of possession^[68] at no time in its long course exercised a direct influence on the opinion of the civilized world comparable to that produced by the mentions of demoniacal possession in the New Testament. It is needless to quote here even a selection from the familiar passages of the Gospels and Acts which display the manner in which certain described symptoms were currently accounted for in public opinion. Regarding these documents from an ethnographic point of view, it need only be said that they prove, incidentally but absolutely, that Jews and Christians at that time held the doctrine which had prevailed for ages before, and continued to prevail for ages after, referring to possession and obsession by spirits the symptoms of mania, epilepsy, dumbness, delirious and oracular utterance, and other morbid conditions, mental and bodily.^[69] Modern missionary works, such as have been cited here, give the most striking evidence of the correspondence of these demoniac symptoms with such as may still be observed among uncivilized races. During the early centuries of Christianity, demoniacal possession indeed becomes peculiarly conspicuous, perhaps not from unusual valence of the animistic theory of disease, but simply because a period of intense religious excitement brought it more than usually into requisition. Ancient ecclesiastical records describe, under the well-known names of 'dæmoniacs' ((Greek characters)), 'possessed' ((Greek characters)), 'energumens' ((Greek characters)), the class of persons whose bodies are seized or possessed by an evil spirit; such attacks being frequently attended with great commotions and vexations and disturbances of the body, occasioning sometimes frenzy and madness, sometimes epileptic fits, and other violent tossings and contortions. These energumens formed recognized part of an early Christian congregation, a standing-place apart being assigned to them in the church. (The church indeed seems to have been the principal habitation of these afflicted creatures, they were occupied out of service-time in such work as sweeping, daily food was provided for them, and they were under the charge of a special order of clergy, the exorcists, whose religious function was to cast out devils by prayer and adjuration and laying on of hands. As to the usual symptoms of possession, Justin, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Minucius, Cyprian, and other early Fathers, give copious descriptions of demons entering into the bodies of men, disordering their health and minds, driving them to wander among the tombs, forcing them to writhe and wallow and rave and foam, howling and declaring their own diabolical names by the patients' voices, but when overcome by conjuration or by blows administered to their victims, quitting the bodies they had entered, and acknowledging the pagan deities to be but devils.^[70]

On a subject so familiar to educated readers I may be excused from citing at length a vast mass of documents, barbaric in nature and only more or less civilized in circumstance, to illustrate the continuance of the doctrine of possession and the rite of exorcism through the middle ages and into modern times. A few salient examples will suffice. For a type of medical details, we may instance the recipes in the 'Early English Leechdoms': a cake of the 'thost' of a white hound baked with meal is to be taken against the attack by. dwarves (i.e. convulsions); a drink of herbs worked up off clear ale with the aid of garlic, holy water, and singing of masses, is to be drunk by a fiend-sick patient out of a church bell. Philosophical argument may be followed in the dissertations of the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' concerning demons substantially inhabiting men and causing illness in them, enquiries which may be pursued under the auspices of Glanvil in the 'Saducismus Triumphatus.' Historical anecdote bears record of the convulsive clairvoyant demon who possessed Nicola Aubry, and under the Bishop of Laon's exorcism testified in an edifying manner to the falsity of Calvinism; of Charles VI. of France, who was possessed, and whose demon a certain priest tried in vain to transfer into the bodies of twelve men who were chained up to receive it; of the German woman at Elbingerode who in a fit of toothache wished the devil might enter into her teeth, and who was possessed by six demons accordingly, which gave their names as Schalk der Wahrheit, Wirk, Widerkraut, Myrrha, Knip, Stüp; of George Lukins of Yatton, whom seven devils threw into fits and talked and sang and barked out of, and who was delivered by a solemn exorcism by seven clergymen at the Temple Church at Bristol in the year 1788.^[71] A strong sense of the permanence of the ancient doctrine may be gained from accounts of the state of public opinion in Europe, from Greece and Italy to France, where within the last century derangement and hysteria were still popularly ascribed to possession and treated by exorcism, just as in the dark ages.^[72] In the year 1861, at Morzine, at the south of the Lake of Geneva, there might be seen in full fury an epidemic of diabolical possession worthy of a Red Indian settlement or a negro kingdom of West Africa, an outburst which the exorcisms of a superstitious priest had so aggravated that there were a hundred and ten raving demoniacs in that single village.^[73] The following is from a letter written in 1862 by Mgr. Anouilh, a French missionary-bishop in China. 'Le croiriez-vous? dix villages se sont convertis. Le diable est furieux et fait les cent coups. Il y a eu, pendant les quinze jours que je viens de prêcher, cinq ou six possessions. Nos catéchumènes avec l'eau bénite chassent les diables, guérissent les malades. J'ai vu des choses merveilleuses. Le diable m'est d'un grand secours pour convertir les païens. Comme au temps de Notre-Seigneur, quoique père du mensonge, il ne peut s'empêcher de dire la vérité. Voyez ce pauvre possédé faisant mille contorsions et disant a grands cris: 'Pourquoi prêches-tu la vraie religion? Je ne puis souffrir que tu m'enlèves mes disciples.' — 'Comment t'appelles-tu?' lui demande le catéchiste. Après quelques refus: 'Je suis l'envoyé de Lucifer.' — 'Combien êtes-vous?' 'Nous sommes vingt-deux.' 'L'eau bénite et le signe de la croix ont délivré ce possédé.'^[74] To conclude the series with a modern spiritualistic instance, one of those where the mediums feel themselves entered and acted though by a spirit other than their own soul. The Rev. Mr. West of Philadelphia describes how a certain possessed medium went through the sword exercise, and fell down senseless; when he came to himself again, the spirit within him declared itself to be the soul of a deceased ancestor of the minister's, who had fought and died in the American War.^[75] We in England now hardly hear of demoniacal possession except as a historical doctrine of divines. We have discarded from religious services the solemn ceremony of casting out devils from the bodies of the possessed, a rite to this day officially retained in the Rituals of the Greek and Roman Churches. Cases of diabolical influence alleged from time to time among ourselves are little noticed except by newspaper paragraphs on superstition and imposture. If, however, we desire to understand the doctrine of possession, its origin and influence in the world, we must look beyond countries where public opinion has passed into this stage, and must study the demoniac theory as it still prevails in lower and lowest levels of culture.

It has to be thoroughly understood that the changed aspect of the subject in modern opinion is not due to disappearance of the actual manifestations which early philosophy attributed to demoniacal influence. Hysteria and epilepsy, delirium and mania, and such like bodily and mental derangement, still exist. Not only do they still exist, but among the lower races, and in superstitious districts among the higher, they are still explained and treated as of old. It is not too much to assert that the doctrine of demoniacal possession is kept up, substantially the same theory to account for substantially the same facts, by half the human race, who thus stand as consistent representatives of their forefathers back into primitive antiquity. It is in the civilized world, under the influence of the medical doctrines which have been developing since classic times, that the early animistic theory of these morbid phenomena has been gradually superseded by views more in accordance with modern science, to the great gain of our health and happiness. The transition which has taken place in the famous insane colony of Gheel in Belgium is typical. In old days, the lunatics were carried there in crowds to be exorcised from their demons at the church of St. Dymphna; to Gheel they still go, but the physician reigns in the stead of the exorcist. Yet wherever, in times old or new, demoniacal influences are brought forward to account for affections which scientific physicians now explain on a different principle, care must be taken not to misjudge the ancient doctrine and its place in history. As belonging to the lower culture it is a perfectly rational philosophical theory to account for certain pathological facts. But just as mechanical astronomy gradually superseded the animistic astronomy of the lower races, so biological pathology gradually supersedes animistic pathology, the immediate operation of personal spiritual beings in both cases giving place to the operation of natural processes.

We now pass to the consideration of another great branch of the lower religion of the world, a development of the same principles of spiritual operation with which we have become familiar in the study of the possession-theory. This is the doctrine of Fetishism. Centuries ago, the Portuguese in West Africa, noticing the veneration paid by the negroes to certain objects, such as trees, fish, plants, idols, pebbles, claws of beasts, sticks and so forth, very fairly compared these objects to the amulets or talismans with which they were themselves familiar, and called them feitiço or 'charm,' a word derived from Latin factitius, in the sense of 'magically artful.' Modern French and English adopted this word from the Portuguese as fétiche, fetish, although curiously enough both languages had already possessed the word for ages in a different sense, Old French faitis, 'well made, beautiful,' which Old English adopted as fetys, 'well made, neat.' It occurs in the commonest of all quotations from Chaucer:

And Frensch sche spak ful faire and fetysly, Aftur the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.'

The President de Brosses, a most original thinker of the 18th century, struck by the descriptions of the African worship of material and terrestrial objects, introduced the word Fétichisme as a general descriptive term,^[76] and since then it has obtained great currency by Comte's use of it to denote a general theory of primitive religion, in which external objects are regarded as animated by a life analogous to man's. It seems to me, however, more convenient to use the word Animism for the doctrine of spirits in general, and to confine the word Fetishism to that subordinate department which it properly belongs to, namely, the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through, certain material objects. Fetishism will be taken as including the worship of 'stocks and stones,' and thence it passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry.

Any object whatsoever may be a fetish. Of course, among the endless multitude of objects, not as we should say physically active, but to which ignorant men ascribe mysterious power, we are not to apply indiscriminately the idea of their being considered vessels or vehicles or instruments of spiritual beings. They may be mere signs or tokens set up to represent ideal notions or ideal beings, as fingers or sticks are set up to represent numbers. Or they may be symbolic charms working by imagined conveyance of their special properties, as an iron ring to give firmness, or a kite's foot to give swift flight. Or they may be merely regarded in some undefined way as wondrous ornaments or curiosities. The tendency runs through all human nature to collect and admire objects remarkable in beauty, form, quality, or scarceness. The shelves of ethnological museums show heaps of the objects which the lower races treasure up

1 (C. de Brosses.) 'Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l'ancienne Religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie.' 1760. [De Brosses supposed the word fétiche connected with chose fee, fatum.] and hang about their persons — teeth and claws, roots and berries, shells and stones, and the like. Now fetishes are in great measure selected from among such things as these, and the principle of their attraction for savage minds is clearly the same which still guides the superstitious peasant in collecting curious trifles 'for luck.' The principle is one which retains its force in far higher ranges of culture than the peasant's. Compare the Ostyak's veneration for any peculiar little stone he has picked up, with the Chinese love of collecting curious varieties of tortoise-shell, or an old-fashioned English conchologist's delight in a reversed shell. The turn of mind which in a Gold-Coast negro would manifest itself in a museum of monstrous and most potent fetishes, might impel an Englishman to collect scarce postage-stamps or queer walking-sticks. In the love of abnormal curiosities there shows itself a craving for the marvellous, an endeavour to get free from the tedious sense of law and uniformity in nature. As to the lower races, were evidence more plentiful as to the exact meaning they attach to objects which they treat with mysterious respect, it would very likely appear more often and more certainly than it does now, that these objects seem to them connected with the action of spirits, so as to be, in the strict sense in which the word is here used, real fetishes. But this must not be taken for granted. To class an object as a fetish, demands explicit statement that a spirit is considered as embodied in it or acting through it or communicating by it, or at least that the people it belongs to do habitually think this of such objects; or it must be shown that the object is treated as having personal consciousness and power, is talked with, worshipped, prayed to, sacrificed to, petted or ill-treated with reference to its past or future behaviour to its votaries. In the instances now selected, it will be seen that in one way or another they more or less satisfy such conditions. In investigating the exact significance of fetishes in use among men, savage or more civilized, the peculiar difficulty is to know whether the effect of the object is thought due to a whole personal spirit embodied in or attached to it, or to some less definable influence exerted through it. In some cases this point is made clear, but in many it remains doubtful.

It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a fetish, to glance at a curious group of nations which connect a disease at once with spiritual influence, and with the presence of some material object. They are a set of illustrations of the savage principle, that a disease or an actual disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or such-like material object. Among the natives of Australia, one hears of the sorcerers extracting from their own bodies by passes and manipulations a magical essence called 'boylya,' which they can make to enter the patient's body like pieces of quartz, which causes pain there and consumes the flesh, and may be magically extracted either as invisible or in the form of a bit of quartz. Even the spirit of the waters, 'nguk-wonga,' which had caused an attack of erysipelas in a boy's leg (he had been bathing too long when heated) is declared to have been extracted by the conjurers from the affected part in the shape of a sharp stone.^[77] The Caribs, who very distinctly referred diseases to the action of hostile demons or deities, had a similar sorcerer's process of extracting thorns or splinters from the affected part as the peccant causes, and it is said that in the Antilles morsels of stone and bone so extracted were wrapped up in cotton by the women, as protective fetishes in childbirth.^[78] The Malagasy, considering all diseases as inflicted by an evil spirit, consult a diviner, whose method is often to remove the disease by means of a 'faditra;' this is some object, such as a little grass, ashes, a sheep, a pumpkin, the water the patient has rinsed his mouth with, or what not, and when the priest has counted on it the evils that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to take them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with it.^[79] 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.^[80] 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 man.^[81] In West Africa, a case in point is the practice of transferring a sick man's ailment to a live fowl, which is set free with it, and if any one catches the fowl, the disease goes to him.^[82] Captain Burton's account from Central Africa is as follows. Disease being possession by a spirit or ghost, the 'mganga' or sorcerer has to expel it, the principal remedies being drumming, dancing, and drinking, till at last the spirit is enticed from the body of the patient into some inanimate article, technically called a 'keti' or stool for it. This may be an ornament, such as a peculiar bead or a leopard's claw, or it may be a nail or rag, which by being driven into or hung to a 'devil's tree' has the effect of laying the disease-spirit. Or disease-spirits may be extracted by chants, one departing at the end of each stave, when a little painted stick made for it is flung on the ground, and some patients may have as many as a dozen ghosts extracted, for here also the fee is so much apiece.^[83] In Siam, the Laos sorcerer can send his 'phi phob' or demon into a victim's body, where it turns into a fleshy or leathery lump, and causes disease ending in death.^[84] Thus, on the one hand, the spirit-theory of disease is seen to be connected with that sorcerer's practice prevalent among the lower races, of pretending to extract objects from the patient's body, such as stones, bones, balls of hair, &c., which are declared to be causes of disease conveyed by magical means into him; of this proceeding I have given a detailed account elsewhere, under the name of the 'sucking-cure.'^[85] On the other hand, there appears among the lower races that well-known conception of a disease or evil influence as an individual being, which may be not merely conveyed by an infected object (though this of course may have much to do with the idea), but may be removed by actual transfer from the patient into some other animal or object. Thus Pliny informs us how pains in the stomach may be cured by transmitting the ailment from the patient's body into a puppy or duck, which will probably die of it;^[86] it is considered baneful to a Hindu woman to be a man's third wife, wherefore the precaution is taken of first betrothing him to a tree, which dies in her stead;^[87] after the birth of a Chinese baby, its father's trousers are hung in the room wrong side up, that all evil influences may enter into them instead of into the child.^[88] Modern folklore still cherishes such ideas. The ethnographer may still study in the 'white witchcraft' of European peasants the arts of curing a man's fever or headache by transferring it to a crawfish or a bird, or of getting rid of ague or gout or warts by giving them to a willow, elder, fir, or ash-tree, with suitable charms, 'Goe morgen, olde, ick geef oe de Kolde,' 'Goden Abend, Herr Fleder, hier bring ick mien Feber, ick bind em di an und gah davan,' 'Ash-tree, ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me,' and so forth; or of nailing or plugging an ailment into a tree-trunk, or conveying it away by some of the patient's hair or nail-parings or some such thing, and so burying it. Looking at these proceedings from a moral point of view, the practice of transferring the ailment to a knot or a lock of hair and burying it is the most harmless, but another device is a very pattern of wicked selfishness. In England, warts may be touched each with a pebble, and the pebbles in a bag left on the road to church, to give up their ailments to the unlucky finder; in Germany, a plaister from a sore may be left at a cross-way to transfer the disease to a passer-by; I am told on medical authority that the bunches of flowers which children offer to travellers in Southern Europe are sometimes intended for the ungracious purpose of sending some disease away from their homes.^[89] One case of this group, mentioned to me by Mr. Spottiswoode, is particularly interesting. In Thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan-berries, a rag, or any small article, touched by a sick person and then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick person from the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Burton's suggestion that the rags, locks of hair, and what not, hung on trees near sacred places by the superstitious from Mexico to India and from Ethiopia to Ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles of disease; the African 'devil's trees' and the sacred trees of Sindh, hung with rags through which votaries have transferred their complaints, being typical cases of a practice surviving in lands of higher culture.

The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to objects may be human souls. Indeed one of the most natural cases of the fetish-theory is when a soul inhabits or haunts what is left of its former body. It is plain enough that by a simple association of ideas the dead person is imagined to keep up a connexion with his remains. Thus we read of the Mandan women going year after year to take food to the skulls of their dead kinsfolk, and sitting by the hour to chat and jest in their most endearing strain with the relics of a husband or child;^[90] thus the Guinea negroes, who keep the bones of parents in chests, will go to talk with them in the little huts which serve for their tombs.^[91] And thus, from the savage who keeps and carries with his household property the cleaned bones of his forefathers,^[92] to the mourner among ourselves who goes to weep at the grave of one beloved, imagination keeps together the personality and. the relics of the dead. Here, then, is a course of thought open to the animistic thinker, leading him on from fancied association to a belief in the real presence of a spiritual being in a material object. Thus there is no difficulty in understanding how the Karens thought the spirits of the dead might come back from the other world to reanimate their bodies;^[93] nor how the Marian islanders should have kept the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts as household gods, and even expected them to give oracles out of their skulls;^[94] nor how the soul of a dead Carib might be thought to abide in one of his bones, taken from the grave and carefully wrapped in cotton, in which state it could answer questions, and even bewitch an enemy if a morsel of his property were wrapped up with it;^[95] nor how the dead Santal should be sent to his fathers by the ceremony of committing to the sacred river morsels of his skull from the funeral-pile.^[96] Such ideas are of great interest in studying the burial rites of mankind, especially the habit of keeping relics of the dead as vehicles of superhuman power, and of even preserving the whole body as a mummy, as in Peru and Egypt. The conception of such human relics becoming fetishes, inhabited or at least acted through by the souls which formerly belonged to them, will give a rational explanation of much relic-worship otherwise obscure.

A further stretch of imagination enables the lower races to associate the souls of the dead with mere objects, a practice which may have had its origin in the merest childish make-believe, but which would lead a thorough savage animist straight on to the conception of the soul entering the object as a body. Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll; this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat at a modern spirit-séance.^[97] Among the Salish Indians of Oregon, the conjurers bring back men's lost souls as little stones or bones or splinters, and pretend to pass them down through the tops of their heads into their hearts, but great care must be taken to remove the spirits of any dead people that may be in the lot, for the patient receiving one would die.^[98] There are indigenous Kol tribes of India who work out this idea curiously in bringing back the soul of a deceased man into the house after the funeral, apparently to be worshipped as a household spirit; while some catch the spirit re-embodied in a fowl or fish, the Binjwar of Raepore bring it home in a pot of water, and the Bunjia in a pot of flour.^[99] The Chinese hold such theories with extreme distinctness, considering one of a man's three spirits to take up its abode in the ancestral tablet, where it receives messages and worship from the survivors; while the long keeping of the dead man's gilt and lacquered coffin, and the reverence and offerings continued at the tomb, are connected with the thought of a spirit lingering about the corpse. Consistent with these quaint ideas are ceremonies in vogue in China, of bringing home in a cock (live or artificial) the spirit of a man deceased in a distant place, and of enticing into a sick man's coat the departing spirit which has already left his body, and so conveying it back.^[100] Tatar folklore illustrates the idea of soul-embodiment in the quaint but intelligible story of the demon-giant who could not be slain, for he did not keep his soul in his body, but in a twelve-headed snake carried in a bag on his horse's back; the hero finds out the secret and kills the snake, and then the giant dies too. This tale is curious, as very likely indicating the original sense of a well-known group of stories in European folklore, the Scandinavian one, for instance, where the giant cannot be made an end of, because he keeps his heart not in his body, but in a duck's egg in a well far away; at last the young champion finds the egg and crushes it, and the giant bursts.^[101] Following the notion of soul-embodiment into civilized times, we learn that 'A ghost may be laid for any term less than an hundred years, and in any place or body, full or empty; as, a solid oak — the pommel of a sword — a barrel of beer, if a yeoman or simple gentleman — or a pipe of wine, if an esquire or a justice.' This is from Grose's bantering description in the 18th century of the art of 'laying' ghosts,^[102] and it is one of the many good instances of articles of serious savage belief surviving as jests among civilized men.

Thus other spiritual beings, roaming free about the world, find fetish-objects to act through, to embody themselves in, to present them visibly to their votaries. It is extremely difficult to draw a distinct line of separation between the two prevailing sets of ideas relating to spiritual action through what we call inanimate objects. Theoretically we can distinguish the notion of the object acting as it were by the will and force of its own proper soul or spirit, from the notion of some foreign spirit entering its substance or acting on it from without, and so using it as a body or instrument. But in practice these conceptions blend almost inextricably. This state of things is again a confirmation of the theory of animism here advanced, which treats both sets of ideas as similar developments of the same original idea, that of the human soul, so that they may well shade imperceptibly into one another. To depend on some typical descriptions of fetishism and its allied doctrines in different grades of culture, is a safer mode of treatment than to attempt too accurate a general definition.

There is a quaint story, dating from the time of Columbus, which shows what mysterious personality and power rude tribes could attach to lifeless matter. The cacique Hatuey, it is related, heard by his spies in Hispaniola that the Spaniards were coming to Cuba. So he called his people together, and talked to them of the Spaniards — how they persecuted the natives of the islands, and how they did such things for the sake of a great lord whom they much desired and loved. Then, taking out a basket with gold in it, he said, 'Ye see here their lord whom they serve and go after; and, as ye have heard, they are coming hither to seek this lord. Therefore let us make him a feast, that when they come he may tell them not to do us harm.' So they danced and sang from night to morning before the gold-basket, and then the cacique told them not to keep the Christian's lord anywhere, for if they kept him in their very bowels they would have to bring him out; so he bade them cast him to the bottom of the river, and this they did.^[103] If this story be thought too good to be true, at any rate it does not exaggerate authentic savage ideas. The 'maraca' or ceremonial rattle, used by certain rude Brazilian tribes, was an eminent fetish. It was a calabash with a handle and a hole for a mouth, and stones inside; yet to its votaries it seemed no mere rattle, but the receptacle of a spirit that spoke from it when shaken; therefore the Indians set up their maracas, talked to them, set food and drink and burned incense before them, held annual feasts in their honour, and would even go to war with their neighbours to satisfy the rattle-spirits' demand for human victims.^[104] Among the North American Indians, the fetish-theory seems involved in that remarkable and general proceeding known as getting 'medicine.' Each youth obtains in a vision or dream a sight of his medicine, and considering how thoroughly the idea prevails that the forms seen in visions and dreams are spirits, this of itself shows the animistic nature of the matter. The medicine thus seen may be an animal, or part of one, such as skin or claws, feather or shell, or such a thing as a plant, a stone, a knife, a pipe; this object he must obtain, and thenceforward through life it becomes his protector. Considered as a vehicle or receptacle of a spirit, its fetish-nature is shown in many ways; its owner will do homage to it, make feasts in its honour, sacrifice horses, dogs, and other valuable objects to it or its spirit, fast to appease it if offended, have it burned with him to conduct him as a guardian-spirit to the happy hunting-grounds. Beside these special protective objects, the Indians, especially the medicine-men (the word is French, 'médecin,' applied to these native doctors or conjurers, and since stretched to take in all that concerns their art), use multitudes of other fetishes as means of spiritual influence.^[105] Among the Turanian tribes of Northern Asia, where Castrén describes the idea of spirits contained in material objects, to which they belong, and wherein they dwell in the same incomprehensible way as the souls in a man's body, we may notice the Ostyak's worship of objects of scarce or peculiar quality, and also the connexion of the shamans or sorcerers with fetish-objects, as where the Tatars consider the innumerable rags and tags, bells and bits of iron, that adorn the shaman's magic costume, to contain spirits helpful to their owner in his magic craft.^[106] John Bell, in his journey across Asia in 1719, relates a story which well illustrates Mongol ideas as to the action of self-moving objects. A certain Russian merchant told him that once some pieces of damask were stolen out of his tent. He complained, and the Kutuchtu Lama ordered the proper steps to be taken to find out the thief. One of the Lamas took a bench with four feet, and after turning it several times in different directions, at last it pointed directly to the tent where the stolen goods lay concealed. The Lama now mounted astride the bench, and soon carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried him, to the very tent, where he ordered the damask to be produced. The demand was directly complied with: for it is vain in such cases to offer any excuse.^[107]

A more recent account from Central Africa may be placed as a pendant to this Asiatic account of divination by a fetish-object. The Rev. H. Rowley says of the Manganja, that they believed the medicine-men could impart a power for good or evil to objects either animate or inanimate, which objects the people feared,though they did not worship them. This missionary once saw this art employed to detect the thief who had stolen some corn. The people assembled round a large fig-tree. The magician, a wild-looking man, produced two sticks, like our broomsticks, which after mysterious manipulation and gibberish he delivered to four young men, two holding each stick. A zebra-tail and a calabash-rattle were given to a young man and a boy. The medicine-man rolled himself about in hideous fashion, and chanted an unceasing incantation; the bearers of the tail and rattle went round the stick-holders, and shook these implements over their heads. After a while the men with the sticks had spasmodic twitchings of the arms and legs, these increased nearly to convulsions, they foamed at the mouth, their eyes seemed starting from their heads, they realized to the full the idea of demoniacal possession. According to the native notion, it was the sticks which were possessed primarily, and through them the men, who could hardly hold them. The sticks whirled and dragged the men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny shrub, and over every obstacle, nothing stopped them, their bodies were torn and bleeding; at last they came back to the assembly, whirled round again, and rushed down the path to fall panting and exhausted in the hut of one of a chief's wives, the sticks rolling to her very feet, denouncing her as the thief. She denied it, but the medicine-man answered, 'The spirit has declared her guilty, the spirit never lies.' However, the 'muavi' or ordeal-poison was administered to a cock, as deputy for the woman ; the bird threw it up, and she was acquitted.^[108]

Fetishism in the lower civilization is thus by no means confined to the West African negro with whom we specially associate the term. Yet, what with its being in fact extremely prevalent there, and what with the attention of foreign observers having been particularly drawn to it, the accounts from West Africa are certainly the fullest and most minute on record. The late Professor Waitz's generalization of the principle involved in these is much to the purpose. He thus describes the negro's conception of his fetish. 'According to his view, a spirit dwells or can dwell in every sensible object, and often a very great and mighty one in an insignificant thing. This spirit he does not consider as bound fast and unchangeably to the corporeal thing it dwells in, but it has only its usual or principal abode in it. The negro indeed in his conception not uncommonly separates the spirit from the sensible object which it inhabits, he even sometimes contrasts the one with the other, but most usually combines the two as forming a whole, and this whole is (as the Europeans call it) the "fetish," the object of his religious worship.' Some further particulars will show how this principle is worked out. Fetishes (native names for them are 'grigri,' 'juju,' &c.) may be mere curious mysterious objects that strike a negro's fancy, or they may be consecrated or affected by a priest or fetish-man; the theory of their influence is that they belong to or are made effectual by a spirit or demon yet they have to stand the test of experience, and if they fail to bring their owner luck and safety, he discards them for some more powerful medium. The fetish can see and hear and understand and act, its possessor worships it, talks familiarly with it as a dear and faithful friend, pours libations of rum over it, and in times of danger calls loudly and earnestly on it as if to wake up its spirit and energy. To give an idea of the sort of things which are chosen as fetishes, and of the manner in which they are associated with spiritual influences, Römer's account from Guinea about a century ago may serve. In the fetish-house, he says, there hang or lie thousands of rubbishy trifles, a pot with red earth and a cock's feather stuck in it, pegs wound over with yarn, red parrots' feathers, men's hair, and so forth. The principal thing in the hut is the stool for the fetish to sit on, and the mattress for him to rest on, the mattress being no bigger than a man's hand and the stool in proportion, and there is a little bottle of brandy always ready for him. Here the word fetish is used as it often is, to denote the spirit which dwells in this rudimentary temple, but we see that the innumerable quaint trifles which we call fetishes were associated with the deity in his house. Römer once peeped in at an open door, and found an old negro caboceer sitting amid twenty thousand fetishes in his private fetish-museum, thus performing his devotions. The old man told him he did not know the hundredth part of the use they had been to him; his ancestors and he had collected them, each had done some service. The visitor took up a stone about as big as a hen's egg, and its owner told its history. He was once going out on important business, but crossing the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt himself. Ha ha! thought he, art thou here? So he took the stone, and it helped him through his undertaking for days. In our own time, West Africa is still a world of fetishes. The traveller finds them on every path, at every ford, on every house-door, they hang as amulets round every man's neck, they guard against sickness or inflict it if neglected, they bring rain, they fill the sea with fishes willing to swim into the fisherman's net, they catch and punish thieves, they give their owner a bold heart and confound his enemies, there is nothing that the fetish cannot do or undo, if it be but the right fetish. Thus the one-sided logic of the barbarian, making the most of all that fits and glossing over all that fails, has shaped a universal fetish-philosophy of the events of life. So strong is the pervading influence, that the European in Africa is apt to catch it from the negro, and himself, as the saying is, 'become black.' Thus even yet some traveller, watching a white companion asleep, may catch a glimpse of some claw or bone or such-like sorcerer's trash secretly fastened round his neck.^[109]

European life, lastly, shows well-marked traces of the ancient doctrine of spirits or mysterious influences inhabiting objects. Thus a mediæval devil might go into an old sow, a straw, a barleycorn, or a willow-tree. A spirit might be carried about in a solid receptacle for use: —

' Besides in glistering glasses fayre, or else in christall cleare, They sprightes enclose.'

Modern peasant folklore knows that spirits must have some animal body or other object to dwell in, a feather, a bag, a bush, for instance. The Tyrolese object to using grass for toothpicks because of the demons that may have taken up their abode in the straws. The Bulgarians hold it a great sin not to fumigate the flour when it is brought from the mill (particularly if the mill be kept by a Turk) in order to prevent the devil from entering into it.^[110] Amulets are still carried in the most civilized countries of the world, by the ignorant and superstitious with real savage faith in their mysterious virtues, by the more enlightened in quaint survival from the past. The mental and physical phenomena of what is now called 'table-turning' belong to a class of proceedings which have here been shown to be familiar to the lower races, and accounted for by them on a theory of extra-human influence which is in the most extreme sense spiritualistic.

In giving its place in the history of mental development to the doctrine of the lower races as to embodiment in or penetration of an object by a spirit or an influence, there is no slight interest in comparing it with theories familiar to the philosophy of cultured nations. Thus Bishop Berkeley remarks on the obscure expressions of those who have described the relation of power to the objects which exert it. He cites Torricelli as likening matter to an enchanted vase of Circe serving as a receptacle of force, and declaring that power and impulse are such subtle abstracts and refined quintessences, that they cannot be enclosed in any other vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids; also Leibnitz as comparing active primitive power to soul or substantial form. Thus, says Berkeley, must even the greatest men, when they give way to abstraction, have recourse to words having no certain signification, and indeed mere scholastic shadows.^[111] We may fairly add that such passages show the civilized metaphysician falling back on such primitive conceptions as still occupy the minds of the rude natives of Siberia and Guinea. To go yet farther, I will venture to assert that the scientific conceptions current in my own schoolboy days, of heat and electricity as invisible fluids passing in and out of solid bodies, are ideas which reproduce with extreme closeness the special doctrine of Fetishism.

Under the general heading of Fetishism, but for convenience' sake separately, may be considered the worship of 'stocks and stones.' Such objects, if merely used as altars, are not of the nature of fetishes, and it is first necessary to ascertain that worship is actually addressed to them. Then arises the difficult question, are the stocks and stones set up as mere ideal representatives of deities, or are these deities considered as physically connected with them, embodied in them, hovering about them, acting through them? In other words, are they only symbols, or have they passed in the minds of their votaries into real fetishes? The conceptions of the worshippers are sometimes in this respect explicitly stated, may sometimes be fairly inferred from the circumstances, and are often doubtful.

Among the lower races of America, the Dacotas would pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it as grandfather, make offerings to it and pray to it to deliver them from danger;^[112] in the West India Islands, mention is made of three stones to which the natives paid great devotion — one was profitable for the crops, another for women to be delivered without pain, the third for sunshine and rain when they were wanted;^[113] and we hear of Brazilian tribes setting up stakes in the ground, and making offerings before them to appease their deities or demons.^[114] Stone-worship held an important place in the midst of the comparatively high culture of Peru, where not only was reverence given to especial curious pebbles and the like, but stones were placed to represent the penates of households and the patron-deities of villages. It is related by Montesinos that when the worship of a certain sacred stone was given up, a parrot flew from it into another stone, to which adoration was paid: and though this author is not of good credit, he can hardly have invented a story which, as we shall see, so curiously coincides with the Polynesian idea of a bird conveying to and from an idol the spirit which embodies itself in it.^[115]

In Africa, stock-and-stone worship is found among the Damaras of the South, whose ancestors are represented at the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes consecrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first offered;^[116] among the Dinkas of the White Nile, where the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food and drink before a short thick staff planted in the ground, that the demon might not hurt her;^[117] among the Gallas of Abyssinia, a people with a well-marked doctrine of deities, and who are known to worship stones and logs, but not idols.^[118] In the island of Sambawa, the Orang Dongo attribute all supernatural or incomprehensible force to the sun, moon, trees, &c.,but especially to stones, and when troubled by accident or disease, they carry offerings to certain stones to implore the favour of their genius or dewa.^[119] Similar ideas are to be traced through the Pacific islands, both among the lighter and the darker races. Thus in the Society Islands, rude logs or fragments of basalt columns, clothed in native cloth and anointed with oil, received adoration and sacrifice as divinely powerful by virtue of the atua or deity which had filled them.^[120] So in the New Hebrides worship was given to water-worn pebbles,^[121] while Fijian gods and goddesses had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.^[122] The curiously anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having children, is familiar to the Fijians as it is to the Peruvians and the Lapps.

The Turanian tribes of North Asia display stock-and-stone worship in full sense and vigour. Not only were stones, especially curious ones and such as were like men or animals, objects of veneration, but we learn that they were venerated because mighty spirits dwelt in them. The Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, with its two deities, one with a stone head, the other a mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red lappets, and both smeared with sacrificial blood, may serve as a type of stone-worship. And as for the Ostyaks, had the famous King Log presented himself among them, they would without more ado have wrapped his sacred person in rags, and set him up for worship on a mountain-top or in the forest.^[123] The frequent stock-and-stone worship of modern India belongs especially to races non-Hindu or part-Hindu in race and culture. Among such may serve as examples the bamboo which stands for the Bodo goddess Mainou, and for her receives the annual hog, and the monthly eggs offered by the women;^[124] the stone under the great cotton-tree of every Khond village, shrine of Nadzu Pennu the village deity;^[125] the clod or stone under a tree, which in Behar will represent the deified soul of some dead personage who receives worship and inspires oracles there;^[126] the stone kept in every house by the Bakadâra and Betadâra, which represents their god Bûta, whom they induce by sacrifice to restrain the demon-souls of the dead from troubling them;^[127] the two rude stones placed under a shed among the Shanars of Tinnevelly, by the medium of which the great god and goddess receive sacrifice, but which are thrown away or neglected when done with.^[128] , The remarkable groups of standing-stones in India are, in many cases at least, set up for each stone to represent or embody a deity. Mr. Hislop remarks that in every part of Southern India, four or five stones may often be seen in the ryot's field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which they consider as guardians of the field and call the five Pândus ; he reasonably takes these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient native appellations. In the Indian groups it is a usual practice to daub each stone with red paint, forming as it were a great blood-spot where the face would be if it were a shaped idol.^[129] In India, moreover, the rites of stone-worship are not unexampled among the Hindus proper. Shashtî, protectress of children, receives worship, vows, and offerings, especially from women; yet they provide her with no idol or temple, but her proper representative is a rough stone as big as a man's head, smeared with red paint and set at the foot of the sacred vata-tree. Even Siva is worshipped as a stone, especially that Siva who will afflict a child with epileptic fits, and then, speaking by its voice, will announce that he is Panchânana the Five-faced, and is punishing the child for insulting his image; to this Siva, in the form of a clay idol or of a stone beneath a sacred tree, there are offered not only flowers and fruits, but also bloody sacrifices.^[130]

This stone-worship among the Hindus seems a survival of a rite belonging originally to a low civilization, probably a rite of the rude indigenes of the land, whose religion, largely incorporated into the religion of the Aryan invaders, has contributed so much to form the Hinduism of to-day. It is especially interesting to survey the stock-and-stone worship of the lower culture, for it enables us to explain by the theory of survival the appearance in the Old World, in the very midst of classic doctrine and classic art, of the worship of the same rude objects, whose veneration no doubt dated from remote barbaric antiquity. As Mr. Grote says, speaking of Greek worship, 'The primitive memorial erected to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but was often nothing more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone or a post, receiving care and decoration from the neighbourhood, as well as worship.' Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Eubœa, the stake that represented Pallas Athene, 'sine effigie rudis palus, et informe lignum,' the unwrought stone ((Greek characters)) at Hyettos which 'after the ancient manner' represented Herakles, the thirty such stones which the Pharæans in like archaic fashion worshipped for the gods, and that one which received such honour in Bœotian festivals as representing the Thespian Eros. Theophrastus, in the 4th century B.C., depicts the superstitious Greek passing the anointed stones in the streets, taking out his phial and pouring oil on them, falling on his knees to adore, and going his way. Six centuries later, Arnobius could describe from his own heathen life the state of mind of the stock-and-stone worshipper, telling how when he saw one of the stones anointed with oil, he accosted it in flattering words, and asked benefits from the senseless thing as though it contained a present power.^[131] The ancient and graphic passage in the book of Isaiah well marks stone-worship within the range of the Semitic race:

'Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion: They, they are thy lot: Even to them hast thou poured a drink-offering, Hast thou offered a meat-offering.'^[132]

Long afterwards, among the local deities which Mohammed found in Arabia, and which Dr. Sprenger thinks he even acknowledged as divine during a moment when he well-nigh broke down in his career, were Manah and Lât, the one a rock, the other a stone or a stone idol; while the veneration of the black stone of the Kaaba, which Captain Burton thinks an aërolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the Prophet transplanted into his new religion, where it flourishes to this day.^[133] The curious passage in Sanchoniathon which speaks of the Heaven-god forming the 'bætyls, animated stones' (θεὸς Οὐρανὸς Βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους, μηχανησάμενος) perhaps refers to meteorites or supposed thunderbolts fallen from the clouds. To the old Phœnician religion, which made so deep a contact with the Jewish world on the one side and the Greek and Roman on the other, there belonged the stone pillars of Baal and the wooden ashera-posts, but how far these objects were of the character of altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle.^[134] We may still say with Tacitus, describing the conical pillar which stood instead of an image to represent the Paphian Venus — 'et ratio in obscuro.'

There are accounts of formal Christian prohibitions of stone-worship in France and England, reaching on into the early middle ages,^[135] which show this barbaric cultus as then distinctly lingering in popular religion. Coupling this fact with the accounts of the groups of standing-stones set up to represent deities in South India, a corresponding explanation has been suggested in Europe. Are the menhirs, cromlechs, &c., idols, and circles and lines of idols, worshipped by remotely ancient dwellers in the land as representatives or embodiments of their gods? The question at least deserves consideration, although the ideas with which stone-worship is carried on by different races are multifarious, and the analogy may be misleading. It is remarkable to what late times full and genuine stone-worship has survived in Europe. In certain mountain districts of Norway, up to the end of the last century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday evening (which seems to show some connection with Thor), smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the seat of honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the house.^[136] In an account dating from 1851, the islanders of Inniskea, off Mayo, are declared to have a stone carefully wrapped in flannel, which is brought out and worshipped at certain periods, and when a storm arises it is supplicated to send a wreck on the coast.^[137] No savage ever showed more clearly by his treatment of a fetish that he considered it a personal being, than did these Norwegians and Irishmen. The ethnographic argument from the existence of stock-and-stone worship among so many nations of comparatively high culture seems to me of great weight as bearing on religious development among mankind. To imagine that peoples skilled in carving wood and stone, and using these arts habitually in making idols, should have gone out of their way to invent a practice of worshipping logs and pebbles, is not a likely theory. But on the other hand, when it is considered how such a rude object serves to uncultured men as a divine image or receptacle, there is nothing strange in its being a relic of early barbarism holding its place against more artistic models through ages of advancing civilization, by virtue of the traditional sanctity which belongs to survival from remote antiquity.

By a scarcely perceptible transition, we pass to Idolatry. A few chips or scratches or daubs of paint suffice to convert the rude post or stone into an idol. Difficulties which complicate the study of stock-and-stone worship disappear in the worship of even the rudest of unequivocal images, which can no longer be mere altars, and if symbols must at least be symbols of a personal being. Idolatry occupies a remarkable district in the history of religion. It hardly belongs to the lowest savagery, which simply seems not to have attained to it, and it hardly belongs to the highest civilization, which has discarded it. Its place is intermediate, ranging from the higher savagery where it first clearly appears, to the middle civilization where it reaches its extreme development, and thenceforward its continuance is in dwindling survival and sometimes expanding revival. The position thus outlined is, however, very difficult to map exactly. Idolatry does not seem to come in uniformly among the higher savages; it belongs, for instance, fully to the Society Islanders, but not to the Tongans and Fijians. Among higher nations, its presence or absence does not necessarily agree with particular national affinities or levels of culture — compare the idol-worshipping Hindu with his ethnic kinsman the idol-hating Parsi, or the idolatrous Phœnician with his ethnic kinsman the Israelite, among whose people the incidental relapse into the proscribed image-worship was a memory of disgrace. Moreover, its tendency to revive is ethnographically embarrassing. The ancient Vedic religion seems not to recognize idolatry, yet the modern Brahmans, professed followers of Vedic doctrine, are among the greatest idolaters of the world. Early Christianity by no means abrogated the Jewish law against image-worship, yet image-worship became and still remains widely spread and deeply rooted in Christendom.

Of Idolatry, so far as its nature is symbolic or representative, I have given some account elsewhere.^[138] The old and greatest difficulty in investigating the general subject is this, that an image may be, even to two votaries kneeling side by side before it, two utterly different things; to the one it may be only a symbol, a portrait, a memento; while to the other it is an intelligent and active being, by virtue of a life or spirit dwelling in it or acting through it. In both cases Image-worship is connected with the belief in spiritual beings, and is in fact a subordinate development of animism. But it is only so far as the image approximates to the nature of a material body provided for a spirit, that Idolatry comes properly into connexion with Fetishism. It is from this point of view that it is proposed to examine here its purpose and its place in history. An idol, so far as it belongs to the theory of spirit-embodiment, must combine the characters of portrait and fetish. Bearing this in mind, and noticing how far the idol is looked on as in some way itself an energetic object, or as the very receptacle enshrining a spiritual god, let us proceed to judge how far, along the course of civilization, the idea of the image itself exerting power or being personally animate has prevailed in the mind of the idolater.

As to the actual origin of idolatry, it need not be supposed that the earliest idols made by man seemed to their maker living or even active things. It is quite likely that the primary intention of the image was simply to serve as a sign or representative of some soul or deity, and certainly this original character is more or less maintained in the world through the long history of image-worship. At a stage succeeding this original condition, it may be argued, the tendency to identify the symbol and the symbolized, a tendency so strong among children and the ignorant everywhere, led to the idol being treated as a living powerful being, and thence even to explicit doctrines as to the manner of its energy or animation. It is, then, in this secondary stage, where the once merely representative image is passing into the active image-fetish, that we are particularly concerned to understand it. Here it is reasonable to judge the idolater by his distinct actions and beliefs. A line of illustrative examples will carry the personality of the idol through grade after grade of civilization. Among the lower races, such thoughts are displayed by the Kurile islander throwing his idol into the sea to calm the storm; by the negro who feeds ancestral images and brings them a share of his trade profits, but will beat an idol or fling it into the fire if it cannot give him luck or preserve him from sickness; by famous idols of Madagascar, of which one goes about of himself or guides his bearers, and another answers when spoken to — at least, they did this till they were ignominiously found out a few years ago. Among Tatar peoples of North Asia and Europe, conceptions of this class are illustrated by the Ostyak, who clothes his puppet and feeds it with broth, but if it brings him no sport will try the effect of a good thrashing on it, after which he will clothe and feed it again; by the Lapps, who fancied their uncouth images could go about at will; or the Esths, who wondered that their idols did not bleed when Dieterich the Christian priest hewed them down. Among high Asiatic nations, what could be more anthropomorphic than the rites of modern Hinduism, the dances of the nautch-girls before the idols, the taking out of Jagannath in procession to pay visits, the spinning of tops before Krishna to amuse him? Buddhism is a religion in its principles little favourable to idolatry. Yet, from setting up portrait-statues of Gautama and other saints, there developed itself the full worship of images, and even of images with hidden joints and cavities, which moved and spoke as in our own middle ages. In China, we read stories of worshippers abusing some idol that has failed in its duty. 'How now,' they say, 'you dog of a spirit; we have given you an abode in a splendid temple, we gild you and feed you and fumigate you with incense, and yet you are so ungrateful that you won't listen to our prayers!' So they drag him in the dirt, and then, if they get what they want, it is but to clean him and set him up again, with apologies and promises of a new coat of gilding. There is what appears a genuine story of a Chinaman who had paid an idol priest to cure his daughter, but she died; whereupon the swindled worshipper brought an action at law against the god, who for his fraud was banished from the province. The classic instances, again, are perfect — the dressing and anointing of statues, feeding them with delicacies and diverting them with raree-shows, summoning them as witnesses; the story of the Arkadian youths coming back from a bad day's hunting and revenging themselves by scourging and pricking Pan's statue, and the companion tale of the image which fell upon the man who ill-treated it; the Tyrians chaining the statue of the Sun-god that he might not abandon their city; Augustus chastising in effigy the ill-behaved Neptune; Apollo's statue that moved when it would give an oracle; and the rest of the images which brandished weapons, or wept, or sweated, to prove their supernatural powers. Such ideas continued to hold their place in Christendom, as was natural, considering how directly the holy image or picture took the place of the household god or the mightier idol of the temple. The Russian boor covering up the saint's picture that it may not see him do wrong; the Mingrelian borrowing a successful neighbour's saint when his own crop fails, or when about to perjure himself choosing for the witness of his deceitful oath a saint of mild countenance and merciful repute; the peasant of Southern Europe, alternately coaxing and trampling on his special saint-fetish, and ducking the Virgin or St. Peter for rain; the winking and weeping images that are worked, even at this day, to the greater glory of God, or rather to the greater shame of Man — these are but the extreme instances of the worshipper's endowment of the sacred image with a life and personality modelled on his own.^[139]

The appearance of idolatry at a grade above the lowest of known human culture, and its development in extent and elaborateness under higher conditions of civilization, are well displayed among the native races of America. 'Conspicuous by its absence' among many of the lower tribes, image-worship comes plainly into view toward the upper levels of savagery, as where, for instance, Brazilian native tribes set up in their huts, or in the recesses of the forest, their pygmy heaven-descended figures of wax or wood;^[140] or where the Mandans, howling and whining, made their prayers before puppets of grass and skins; or where the spiritual beings of the Algonquins (manitu) or the Hurons (oki) were represented by, and in language identified with, the carved wooden heads or more complete images to which worship and sacrifice were offered. Among the Virginians and other of the more cultured Southern tribes, these idols even had temples to dwell in.^[141] The discoverers of the New World found idolatry an accepted institution among the islanders of the West Indies. These strong animists are recorded to have carved their little images in the shapes in which they believed the spirits themselves to have appeared to them; and some human figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them. The images of such 'cemi' or spirits, some animal, but most of human type, were found by thousands; and it is even declared that an island near Hayti had a population of idol-makers, who especially made images of nocturnal spectres. The spirit could be conveyed with the image, both were called 'cemi,' and in the local accounts of sacrifices, oracles, and miracles, the deity and the idol are mixed together in a way which at least shows the extreme closeness of their connexion in the native mind.^[142] If we pass to the far higher culture of Peru, we find idols in full reverence, some of them complete figures, but the great deities of Sun and Moon figured by discs with human countenances, like those which to this day represent them in symbol among ourselves. As for the conquered neighbouring tribes brought under the dominion of the Incas, their idols were carried, half trophies and half hostages, to Cuzco, to rank among the inferior deities of the Peruvian Pantheon.^[143] In Mexico, idolatry had attained to its full barbaric development. As in the Aztec mind the world swarmed with spiritual deities, so their material representatives, the idols, stood in the houses at the corners of the streets, on every hill and rock, to receive from passers-by some little offering — a nosegay, a whiff of incense, a drop or two of blood; while in the temples more huge and elaborate images enjoyed the dances and processions in their honour, were fed by the bloody sacrifice of men and beasts, and received the tribute and reverence paid to the great national gods.^[144] Up to a certain point, such evidence bears upon the present question. We learn that the native races of the New World had idols, that those idols in some sort represented ancestral souls and other deities, and for them received adoration and sacrifice. But whether the native ideas of the connexion of spirit and image were obscure, or whether the foreign observers did not get at these ideas, or partly for both reasons, there is a general want of express statement how far the idols of America remained mere symbols or portraits, or how far they had come to be considered the animated bodies of the gods.

It is not always thus, however. In the island regions of the Southern Hemisphere, while image-worship scarcely appears among the Andaman islanders, Tasmanians, or Australians, and is absent or rare in various Papuan and Polynesian districts, it prevails among the majority of the island tribes who have attained to middle and high savage levels. In Polynesian islands, where the meaning of the native idolatry has been carefully examined, it is found to rest on the most absolute theory of spirit-embodiment. Thus, New-Zealanders set up memorial idols of deceased persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them as if still alive, and casting garments to them when they passed by, also they preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor. It is distinctly held that such an atua or ancestral deity enters into the substance of an image in order to hold converse with the living. A priest can by repeating charms cause the spirit to enter into the idol, which he will even jerk by a string round its neck to arrest its attention; it is the same atua or spirit which will at times enter not the image but the priest himself, throw him into convulsions, and deliver oracles through him; while it is quite understood that the images themselves are not objects of worship, nor do they possess in themselves any virtue, but derive their sacredness from being the temporary abodes of spirits.^[145] In the Society Islands, it was noticed in Captain Cook's exploration that the carved wooden images at burial-places were not considered mere memorials, but abodes into which the souls of the departed retired. In Mr. Ellis's account of the Polynesian idolatry, relating as it seems especially to this group, the sacred objects might be either mere stocks and stones, or carved wooden images, from six or eight feet long down to as many inches. Some of these were to represent 'tii,' divine manes or spirits of the dead, while others were to represent 'tu,' or deities of higher rank and power. At certain seasons, or in answer to the prayers of the priests, these spiritual beings entered into the idols, which then became very powerful, but when the spirit departed, the idol remained only a sacred object. A god often came to and passed from an image in the body of a bird, and spiritual influence could be transmitted from an idol by imparting it by contact to certain valued kinds of feathers, which could be carried away in this 'inhabited' state, and thus exert power elsewhere, and transfer it to new idols. Here then we have the similarity of souls to other spirits shown by the similar way in which both become embodied in images, just as these same people consider both to enter into human bodies. And we have the pure fetish, which here is a feather or a log or stone, brought together with the more elaborate carved idol, all under one common principle of spirit-embodiment.^[146] In Borneo, notwithstanding the Moslem prohibition of idolatry, not only do images remain in use, but the doctrine of spirit-embodiment is distinctly applied to them. Among the tribes of Western Sarawak the priestesses have made for them rude figures of birds, which none but they may touch. These are supposed to become inhabited by spirits, and at the great harvest feasts are hung up in bunches of ten or twenty in the long common room, carefully veiled with coloured handkerchiefs. Again, among some Dayak tribes, they will make rude figures of a naked man and woman, and place these opposite to one another on the path to the farms. On their heads are head-dresses of bark, by their sides is the betel-nut basket, and in their hands a short wooden spear. These figures are said to be inhabited each by a spirit who prevents inimical influences from passing on to the farms, and likewise from the farms to the village, and evil betide the profane wretch who lifts his hand against them — violent fever and sickness would be sure to follow.^[147]

West Africa naturally applies its familiar fetish-doctrine of spirit-embodiment to images or idols. How an image may be considered a receptacle for a spirit, is well shown here by the straw and rag figures of men and beasts made in Calabar at the great triennial purification, for the expelled spirits to take refuge in, whereupon they are got rid of over the border.^[148] As to positive idols, nothing could be more explicit than the Gold-Coast account of certain wooden figures called 'amagai,' which are specially treated by a 'wong-man' or priest, and have a 'wong' or deity in connexion with them; so close is the connexion conceived between spirit and image, that the idol is itself called 'wong.'^[149] So in the Ewe district, the same 'edro' or deity who inspires the priest is also present in the idol, and 'edro' signifies both god and idol.^[150] Waitz sums up the principles of West African idolatry in a distinct theory of embodiment, as follows: 'The god himself is invisible, but the devotional feeling and especially the lively fancy of the negro demands a visible object to which worship may be directed. He wishes really and sensibly to behold the god, and seeks to shape in wood or clay the conception he has formed of him. Now if the priest, whom the god himself at times inspires and takes possession of, consecrates this figure to him, the idea has only to follow that the god may in consequence be pleased to take up his abode in the figure, to which he may be specially invited by the consecration, and thus image-worship is seen to be comprehensible enough. Denham found that even to take a man's portrait was dangerous and caused mistrust, from the fear that a part of the living man's soul might be conveyed by magic into the artificial figure. The idols are not, as Bosman thinks, deputies of the gods, but merely objects in which the god loves to place himself, and which at the same time display him in sensible presence to his adorers. The god is also by no means bound fast to his dwelling in the image, he goes out and in, or rather is present in it sometimes with more and sometimes with less intensity.'^[151]

Castrén's wide and careful researches among the rude Turanian tribes of North Asia led him to form a similar conception of the origin and nature of their idolatry. The idols of these people are uncouth objects, often mere stones or logs with some sort of human countenance, or sometimes more finished images, even of metal; some are large, some mere dolls; they belong to individuals, or families, or tribes; they may be kept in the yurts for private use, or set up in sacred groves or on the steppes or near the hunting and fishing places they preside over, or they may even have special temple-houses; some open-air gods are left naked, not to spoil good clothes, but others under cover are decked out with all an Ostyak's or Samoyed's wealth of scarlet cloths and costly furs, necklaces and trinkets; and lastly, to the idols are made rich offerings of food, clothes, furs, kettles, pipes, and the rest of the inventory of Siberian nomade riches. Now these idols are not to be taken as mere symbols or portraits of deities, but the worshippers mostly imagine that the deity dwells in the image or, so to speak, is embodied in it, whereby the idol becomes a real god capable of giving health and prosperity to man. On the one hand, the deity becomes serviceable to the worshipper by being thus contained and kept for his use, and on the other hand, the god profits by receiving richer offerings, failing which it would depart from its receptacle. We even hear of numerous spirits being contained in one image, and flying off at the death of the shaman who owned it. In Buddhist Tibet, as in West Africa, the practice of conjuring into puppets the demons which molest men is a recognized rite; while in Siam the making of clay puppets to be exposed on trees or by the roadside, or set adrift with food-offerings in baskets, is a recognized manner of expelling disease-spirits.^[152] In the image-worship of modern India, there crop up traces of the embodiment-theory. It is possible for the intelligent Hindu to attach as little real personality to a divine image, as to the man of straw which he makes in order to celebrate the funeral rites of a relative whose body cannot be recovered. He can even protest against being treated as an idolater at all, declaring the images of his gods to be but symbols, bringing to his mind thoughts of the real deities, as a portrait reminds one of a friend no longer to be seen in the body. Yet in the popular religion of his country, what could be more in conformity with the fetish-theory than the practice of making temporary hollow clay idols by tens of thousands, which receive no veneration for themselves, and only become objects of worship when the officiating brahman has invited the deity to dwell in the image, performing the ceremony of the 'adhivâsa' or inhabitation, after which he puts in the eyes and the 'prâna,' i.e., breath, life, or soul.^[153]

Nowhere, perhaps, in the wide history of religion, can we find definitions more full and absolute of the theory of deities actually animating their images, than in those passages from early Christian writers which describe the nature and operation of the heathen idols. Arnobius introduces the heathen as declaring that it is not the bronze or gold and silver material they consider to be gods, but they worship in them those beings which sacred dedication introduces, and causes to inhabit the artificial images.^[154] Augustine cites as follows the opinions attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. This Egyptian, he tells us, considers some gods as made by the highest Deity, and some by men; 'he asserts the visible and tangible images to be as it were bodies of gods, for there are within them certain invited spirits, of some avail for doing harm or for fulfilling certain desires of those who pay them divine honours and rites of worship. By a certain art to connect these invisible spirits with visible objects of corporeal matter, that such may be as it were animated bodies, effigies dedicate and subservient to the spirits — this is what he calls making gods, and men have received this great and wondrous power.' And further, this Trismegistus is made to speak of 'statues animated with sense and full of spirit, doing so great things; statues prescient of the future, and predicting it by lots, by priests, by dreams, and by many other ways.'^[155] This idea, as accepted by the early Christians themselves, with the qualification that the spiritual beings inhabiting the idols were not beneficent deities but devils, is explicitly stated by Minucius Felix, in a passage in the 'Octavius,' which gives an instructive account of the aministic philosophy of Christianity towards the beginning of the third century: 'Thus these impure spirits or demons, as shown by the magi, by the philosophers, and by Plato, are concealed by consecration in statues and images, and by their afflatus obtain the authority as of a present deity when at times they inspire priests, inhabit temples, occasionally animate the filaments of the entrails, govern the flight of birds, guide the falling of lots, give oracles enveloped in many falsehoods ... also secretly creeping into (men's) bodies as thin spirits, they feign diseases, terrify minds, distort limbs, in order to compel men to their worship; that fattening on the steam of altars or their offered victims from the flocks, they may seem to have cured the ailments which they had constrained. And these are the madmen whom ye see rush forth into public places; and the very priests without the temple thus go mad, thus rave, thus whirl about. ... All these things most of you know, how the very demons confess of themselves, so often as they are expelled by us from the patients' bodies with torments of word and fires of prayer. Saturn himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatsoever demons ye worship, overcome by pain declare what they are; nor surely do they lie concerning their iniquity, above all when several of you are present. Believe these witnesses, confessing the truth of themselves, that they are demons. For adjured by the true and only God, they shudder reluctant in the wretched bodies; and either they issue forth at once, or vanish gradually, according as the faith of the patient aids, or the grace of the curer favours.'^[156]

The strangeness with which such words now fall upon our ears is full of significance. It is one symptom of that vast quiet change which has come over animistic philosophy in the modern educated world. Whole orders of spiritual beings, worshipped in polytheistic religion, and degraded in early Christendom to real but evil demons, have since passed from objective to subjective existence, have faded from the Spiritual into the Ideal. By the operation of similar intellectual changes, the general theory of spirit-embodiment, having fulfilled the great work it had for ages to do in religion and philosophy, has now dwindled within the limits of the educated world to near its vanishing-point. The doctrines of Disease-possession and Oracle-possession, once integral parts of the higher philosophy, and still maintaining a vigorous existence in the lower culture, seem to be dying out within the influence of the higher into dogmatic survival, conscious metaphor, and popular superstition. The doctrine of spirit-embodiment in objects, Fetishism, now scarcely appears outside barbaric regions save in the peasant folklore which keeps it up amongst us with so many other remnants of barbaric thought. And the like theory of spiritual influence as applied to Idolatry, though still to be studied among savages and barbarians, and on record in past ages of the civilized world, has perished so utterly amongst ourselves, that few but students are aware of its ever having existed.

To bring home to our minds the vastness of the intellectual tract which separates modern from savage philosophy, and to enable us to look back along the path where step by step the mind's journey was made, it will serve us to glance over the landmarks which language to this day keeps standing. Our modern languages reach back through the middle ages to classic and barbaric times, where in this matter the transition from the crudest primæval animism is quite manifest. We keep in daily use, and turn to modern meaning, old words and idioms which carry us home to the philosophy of ancient days. We talk of 'genius' still, but with thought how changed. The genius of Augustus was a tutelary demon, to be sworn by and to receive offerings on an altar as a deity. In modern English, Shakspere, Newton, or Wellington, is said to be led and prompted by his genius, but that genius is a shrivelled philosophic metaphor. So the word 'spirit' and its kindred terms keep up with wondrous pertinacity the traces which connect the thought of the savage with its hereditary successor, the thought of the philosopher. Barbaric philosophy retains as real what civilized language has reduced to simile. The Siamese is made drunk with the demon of the arrack that possesses the drinker, while we with so different sense still extract the 'spirit of wine.'^[157] Look at the saying ascribed to Pythagoras, and mentioned by Porphyry. 'The sound indeed which is given by striking brass, is the voice of a certain demon contained in that brass.' These might have been the representative words of some savage animistic philosopher; but with the changed meaning brought by centuries of philosophizing, Oken hit upon a definition almost identical in form, that 'What sounds, announces its spirit' ('Was tönt, gibt seinen Geist kund').^[158] What the savage would have meant, or Porphyry after him did mean, was that the brass was actually animated by a spirit of the brass apart from its matter, but when a modern philosopher takes up the old phrase, all he means is the qualities of the brass. As in other animistic phrases of thought and feeling such as 'animal spirits,' or being in 'good and bad spirits,' the term only recalls with an effort the long-past philosophy which it once expressed. The modern theory of the mind considers it capable of performing even exalted and unusual functions without the intervention of prompting or exciting demons ; yet the old recognition of such beings crops up here and there in phrases which adapt animistic ideas to commonplaces of human disposition, as when a man is still said to be animated by a patriotic spirit, or possessed by a spirit of disobedience. In old times the ἐγγαστρίμυθος, or 'ventriloquus' was really held to have a spirit rumbling or talking from inside his body, as when Eurykles the soothsayer was inspired by such a familiar; or when a certain Patriarch mentioning a demon heard to speak out of a man's belly, remarks on the worthy place it had chosen to dwell in. In the time of Hippokrates, the giving of oracular responses by such ventriloquism was practised by certain women as a profession. To this day in China one may get an oracular response from a spirit apparently talking out of a medium's stomach, for a fee of about twopence-halfpenny. How changed a philosophy it marks, that among ourselves the word 'ventriloquist' should have sunk to its present meaning.^[159] Nor is that

2 Suidas, s.v. ἐγγαστρίμυθος; Isidor. Gloss. s.v. 'præcantatores'; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 578. Maury, 'Magie,' &c. p. 269. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. ii. p. 115. change less significant which, starting with the conception of a man being really ἔνθεος, possessed by a deity within him, carries on a metamorphosed relic of this thorough animistic thought, from ἐνθουσιασμός to 'enthusiasm.' With all this, let it not be supposed that such change of opinion in the educated world has come about through wanton incredulity or decay of the religious temperament. Its source is the alteration in natural science, assigning new causes for the operations of nature and the events of life. The theory of the immediate action of personal spirits has here, as so widely elsewhere, given place to ideas of force and law. No indwelling deity now regulates the life of the burning sun, no guardian angels drive the stars across the arching firmament, the divine Ganges is water flowing down into the sea to evaporate into cloud and descend again in rain. No deity simmers in the boiling pot, no presiding spirits dwell in the volcano, no howling demon shrieks from the mouth of the lunatic. There was a period of human thought when the whole universe seemed actuated by spiritual life. For our knowledge of our own history, it is deeply interesting that there should remain rude races yet living under the philosophy which we have so far passed from, since Physics, Chemistry, Biology, have seized whole provinces of the ancient Animism, setting force for life and law for will.

1. See Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 134; J. G. Müller, 'Amerikanische Urreligionen,' p. 171.
2. Philo Jud. de Gigantibus, iv.
3. Rituale Romanum: De Exorcizandis Obsessis a Dæmonio.
4. Oldfield, 'Abor. of Australia' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 236. See Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' p. 181.
5. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 104.
6. Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 429.
7. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part ii. p. 195; M. Eastman, 'Dahcotah,' p. 72.
8. Burton, 'Central Afr.' vol. ii. p. 344; Schlegel, 'Ewe-Sprache,' p. xxv.
9. Falkner, 'Patagonia,' p. 116; but cf. Musters, p. 180.
10. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 122.
11. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 206.
12. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. pp. 129, 416; vol. iii. pp. 29, 257, 278; 'Psychologie,' pp. 77, 99; Cross, 'Karens,' l.c. p. 316; Elliot in 'Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 115; Buchanan, 'Mysore, &c.,' in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 677.
13. Shortt, 'Tribes of India,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 192; Tinling, 'Tour round India,' p. 19.
14. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 101.
15. Sir J. Shore in 'Asiatic Res.' vol. iv. p. 331.
16. For some collections of details of manes-worship, see Meiners, 'Geschichte der Religionen,' vol. i. book 3; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. pp. 402-11; 'Psychologie,' pp. 72-114.
17. J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 73, 173, 209, 261; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 39, part iii. p. 237; Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. iii. pp. 191, 204.
18. Backhouse, 'Australia,' p. 105; Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' p. 182.
19. Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 88.
20. Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 104; S. S. Farmer, p. 126; Shortland, 'Trads. of N. Z.' p. 81; Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 108.
21. J. R. Forster, 'Observations,' p. 604; Marsden, 'Sumatra,' p. 258; 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 234.
22. Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 123, 423. As to the connexion of the Vazimbas with the Mazimba of East Africa, see Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 360, 426.
23. Callaway, 'Religious System of Amazulu,' part ii.; see also Arbousset and Daumas, p. 469; Casalis, 'Basutos,' pp. 248-54; Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. pp. 411, 419; Magyar, 'Reisen in Süd-Afrika,' pp. 21, 335 (Congo); Cavazzi, 'Congo,' lib. i.
24. J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 217, 388-93. See Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 181, 194.
25. Bailey in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. ii. p. 301. Compare Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 153.
26. Buchanan, 'Mysore,' in Pinkerton, vol. viii. pp. 674-7. See Macpherson, 'India,' p. 95 (Khonds); Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 183 (Santals).
27. Castrén, 'Finn, Myth.' p. 122; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 90. See Palgrave, 'Arabia,' vol. i. p. 373.
28. Siebold, 'Nippon,' vol. i. p. 3, vol. ii. p. 51; Kempfer, 'Japan,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 672, 680, 723, 755.
29. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 250.
30. Plath, 'Religion der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 65, part ii. p. 89; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. pp. vi. viii.; vol. ii. p. 373; 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' New Ser. vol. ii. p. 363; Legge, 'Confucius,' p. 92.
31. Manu, book iii.
32. Details in Pauly, 'Real-Encyclop.' s.v. 'inferi'; Smith's 'Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Biog. and Myth.'; Meiners, Hartung, &c.
33. Middleton, 'Letter from Rome'; Murray's 'Handbook of Rome.'
34. L. F. Alfred Maury, 'Magie, &c.,' p. 249; 'Acta Sanctorum,' 27 Sep.; Gregor. Turon. De Gloria Martyr, i. 98.
35. J. R. Beste, 'Nowadays at Home and Abroad,' London, 1870, vol. ii. p. 44; 'A New Miracle at Rome; being an Account of a Miraculous Cure, &c., &c.,' London (Washbourne), 1870.
36. Oldfield in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 235; see Grey, 'Australia,' vol. ii. p. 337. Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' pp. 183, 195.
37. 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 307.
38. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 204; 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 73, see p. 125 (Battas); Macpherson, 'India,' p. 370. See also Mason, 'Karens,' l.c. p. 201.
39. 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 110, vol. iv. p. 194; St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. pp. 71, 87; Beeckman in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 133; Meiners, vol. i. p. 278. See also Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 159.
40. Shortland, 'Trads. of N. Z.' pp. 97, 114, 125; Taylor, 'New Zealand,' pp. 48, 137.
41. Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 236.
42. Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. pp. 363, 395, &c., vol. ii. pp. 193, 274; Cook, '3rd Voy.' vol. iii. p. 131. Details of the superhuman character ascribed to weak or deranged persons among other races, in Schoolcraft, part iv. p. 49; Martius, vol i. p. 633; Meiners, vol. i. p. 323; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 181.
43. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 250, part ii. pp. 179, 199, part iii. p. 498; M. Eastman, 'Dahcotah,' pp. xxiii. 34, 41, 72. See also Gregg, 'Commerce of Prairies,' vol. ii. p. 297 (Comanches); Morgan, 'Iroquois,' p. 163; Sproat, p. 174 (Ahts); Egede, 'Greenland,' p. 186; Cranz, p. 269.
44. Roman Pane, xix. in 'Life of Colon'; in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.
45. D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. pp. 73, 168; Musters, 'Patagonians,' p. 180. Se also J. G. Müller, pp. 207, 231 (Caribs); Spix and Martius, 'Brasilien,' vol. i. p. 70; Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 646 (Marcusis).
46. Casalis, 'Basutos,' p. 247; Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 147, &c.; Magyar, 'Süd-Afrika,' p. 21, &c.; Burton, 'Central Afr.' vol. ii. pp. 320, 354; Steere in 'Journ. Anthrop. Inst.' vol. i. 1871, p. cxlvii.
47. Steinhauser, 'Religion des Negers,' in 'Magaz. der Evang. Missions and Bibel-Gesellschaften,' Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 139.
48. J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 217, 388.
49. Hodgson, 'Abor. of India,' pp. 163, 170.
50. Backhouse, 'Australia,' p. 103.
51. Mason, 'Burmah,' p. 107, &c. Cross, l.c. p. 305.
52. Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' pp. 183, &c., 259, &c.
53. Falkner, 'Patagonia,' p. 116. See also Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 418 (Caribs).
54. Georgi, 'Reise im Russ. Reich,' vol. i. p. 280; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 488.
55. Falkner, l.c.
56. Caldwell, 'Dravidian Languages,' App.; Latham, vol. ii. p. 469.
57. Hodgson, 'Abor. of India,' p. 172.
58. Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 278.
59. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 328, see vol. iii. p. 201, 'Psychologie,' p. 139. See also Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 59.
60. Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. pp. 352, 373; Moerenhout, 'Voyage,' vol. i. p. 479; Mariner, 'Tonga Islands,' vol. i. p. 105; Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 373.
61. Dos Santos, 'Ethiopia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 686.
62. Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 57. See also Steinhauser, l.c. pp. 132, 139; J. B. Schlegel, 'Ewe-Sprache,' p. xvi.
63. Details from Tatar races in Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' pp. 164, 173, &c.; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 90; from Abyssinia in Parkyns, 'Life in A.,' ch. xxxiii.
64. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 143, vol. ii. pp. 110, 320.
65. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. pp. 103, 152, 381, 418, vol. iii. p. 247, &c. See also Bowring, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 139; 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iv. p. 507, vol. vi. p. 614; Turpin, in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 761; Kempfer, 'Japan,' ibid. vol. vii. pp. 701, 730, &c.
66. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 155, vol. ii. p. 183; Roberts, 'Oriental Illustrations of the Scriptures,' p. 529; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' pp. 164, 184-7. Sanskrit paiçâcha-graha=demon-seizure, possession. Ancient evidence in Pictet, 'Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. ch. v.
67. Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64; Plat. Phædr. Tim. &c.; Pausan. iv. 27, 2; Xen. Mem. I. i. 9; Plutarch. Vit. Alex.; De Orac. Def.; Lucian. Philopseudes; Petron. Arbiter, Sat.; &c., &c.
68. Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, 'Entdecktes Judenthum,' part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.
69. Matth. ix. 32, xi. 18, xii. 22, xvii. 15; Mark, i. 23, ix. 17; Luke, iv. 33, 39, vii. 33, viii. 27, ix. 39, xiii. 11; John, x. 20; Acts, xvi. 16, xix. 13; &c.
70. For general evidence see Bingham, 'Antiquities of Christian Church,' book iii. ch. iv.; Calmet, 'Dissertation sur les Esprits'; Maury, 'Magie,' &c.; Lecky, 'Hist. of Rationalism.' Among particular passages arc Tertull. Apolog. 23; De Spectaculis, 26; Chrysostom. Homil. xxviii. in Matth. iv.; Cyril. Hierosol. Catech. xvi. 16; Minuc. Fel. Octavius. xxi.; Concil. Carthag. iv.; &c., &c.
71. Details in Cockayne, 'Lecchdoms, &c., of Early England,' vol. i. p. 365, vol. ii. p. 137, 355; Sprenger, 'Malleus Maleficarum,' part ii.; Calmet, 'Dissertation,' vol. i. ch. xxiv.; Horst, 'Zauber-Bibliothek'; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 557, &c.; 'Psychologie,' p. 115, &c.; Voltaire, 'Questions sur l'Encyclopédie,' art., ' Superstition'; 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' 5th ed. art. 'Possession.'
72. See Maury, 'Magie,' &c., part ii. ch. ii.
73. A. Constans, 'Rel. sur une Epidémie d'Hystéro-Démonopathie, en 1861.' 2nd ed. Paris, 1863. For descriptions of such outbreaks, among the North American Indians, see Le Jeune in 'Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,' 1639; Brinton, p. 275; and in Guinea, see J. L. Wilson, 'Western Africa,' p. 217.
74. Gaume, 'L'Eau Bénite au Dix-Neuvième Siècle,' 3rd ed. Paris, 1866, p. 353.
75. West, in 'Spiritual Telegraph,' cited by Bastian.
76. 1
77. Grey, 'Australia,' vol. ii. p. 337; Eyre, 'Australia,' vol. ii. p. 362; Oldfield in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 235, &c.; G. F. Moore, 'Vocab. of S. W. Austr.' pp. 18, 98, 103. See Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' p. 195.
78. Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' pp. 419, 508; J. G. Müller, pp. 173, 207, 217.
79. Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.
80. St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 211, see 72.
81. Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' p. 314.
82. Steinhauser, l.c. p. 141. See also Steere, 'East Afr. Tribes,' in 'Journ. Anthrop. Soc.' vol. i. p. cxlviii.
83. Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 352. See 'Sindh,' p. 177.
84. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 275.
85. 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' ch. x. See Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 116, &c.
86. Plin. xxx. 14, 20. Cardan, 'De Var. Rerum,' cap. xliii.
87. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 134, vol. ii. p. 247.
88. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 122.
89. Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 1118-23; Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 155-70; Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. ii. p. 375, vol. iii. p. 286; Halliwell, 'Pop. Rhymes,' p. 208; R. Hunt, 'Pop. Romances,' 2nd Series, p. 211; Hylten-Cavallius, 'Wärend och Wirdarne,' vol. i. p. 173. It is said, however, that rags fastened on trees by Gypsies, which passers-by avoid with horror as having diseases thus banned into them, are only signs left for the information of fellow vagrants; Liebich, 'Die Zigeuner,' p. 96.
90. Catlin, 'N. A. Indians,' vol. i. p. 90.
91. J. L. Wilson, 'W. Africa,' p. 394.
92. Meiners, 'Gesch. der Rel.' vol. i. p. 305; J. G. Müller, p. 209.
93. Mason, 'Karens,' l.c. p. 231.
94. Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 721-3.
95. Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 418. See Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 485 (Yumanas swallow ashes of deceased with liquor, that he may live again in them).
96. Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 210. See Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 73; J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 209, 262, 289, 401, 419.
97. Darwin, 'Journal,' p. 458.
98. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 320.
99. 'Report of Jubbulpore Ethnological Committee,' Nagpore, 1868, part i. p. 5.
100. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. pp. 151, 207, 214, vol. ii. p. 401; see Plath, 'Religion der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 59, part ii. p. 101.
101. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 187; Dasent, 'Norse Tales,' p. 69; Lane, 'Thousand and One Nights,' vol. iii. p. 316; Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 1033. See also Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 213. Eisenmenger, 'Judenthum,' part ii. p. 39.
102. Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. p. 72.
103. Herrera, 'Hist. de las Indias Occidentales,' Dec. i. ix. 3.
104. Lery, Brésil, p. 249; J. G. Müller, pp. 210, 262.
105. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes'; Waitz, vol. iii.; Catlin, 'N. A. Ind.' vol. i. p. 36; Keating, 'Narrative,' vol. i. p. 421; J. G. Müller, p. 74, &c. See Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 274.
106. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' pp. 162, 221, 230; Meiners, vol. i. p. 170.
107. Bell, in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 357.
108. H. Rowley, 'Universities' Mission to Central Africa,' p. 217.
109. Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 174; Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 56, &c.; J. L. Wilson, 'West Africa,' pp. 135, 211-6, 275, 338; Burton, 'Wit and Wisdom from W. Afr.' pp. 174, 455; Steinhauser, l.c. p. 134; Bosman, 'Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 397; Meiners, 'Gesch. der Relig.' vol. i. p. 173. See also' Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 396; Flacourt, 'Madag.' p. 191.
110. Brand, 'Popular Antiquities,' vol. iii. p. 255, &c. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 171. Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' pp. 75-95, 225, &c. St. Clair and Brophy, 'Bulgaria,' p. 46.
111. Berkeley, 'Concerning Motion,' in 'Works,' vol. ii. p. 86.
112. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part ii. p. 196, part iii. p. 229.
113. Herrera, 'Indias Occidentales,' dec. i. iii. 3.
114. De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.
115. Garcilaso de la Vega, 'Commentarios Reales,' i. 9; J. G. Müller, pp. 263, 311, 371, 387; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 454; see below, p. 175.
116. Hahn, 'Gramm. des Hereró,' s.v. 'omu-makisina.'
117. Kaufmann, 'Central-Afrika,' (White Nile), p. 131.
118. Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 518, 523.
119. Zollinger in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 692.
120. Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 337. See also Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. 399.
121. Turner, 'Polynesia,' pp. 347, 526.
122. Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 220; Seemann, 'Viti,' pp. 66, 89.
123. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 193, &c., 204, &c.; 'Voyages au Nord,' vol. viii. pp. 103, 410; Klemm, 'C. G.' vol. iii. p. 120. See also Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' pp. 265, 276.
124. Hodgson, 'Abor. of India,' p. 174. See also Macrae in 'As. Res.' vol. vii. p. 196; Dalton, 'Kols,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 33.
125. Macpherson, 'India,' pp. 103, 358.
126. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 177. See also Shortt, 'Tribes of Neilgherries,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 281.
127. Elliot in 'Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. 1869, p. 115.
128. Buchanan, 'Mysore,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 739.
129. Elliot in 'Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. pp. 96, 115, 125. Lubbock, 'Origin of Civilization,' p. 222. Forbes Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. ii. p. 462, &c. Prof. Liebrecht, in 'Ztschr. für Ethnologie,' vol. v. p. 100, compares the field-protecting Priapos-hermes of ancient Italy, daubed with minium.
130. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. pp. 142, 182, &c., see 221. See also Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 239. (Siah-push, stone offered to the representative of deity.)
131. Grote, 'Hist. of Greece,' vol. iv. p. 132; Welcker, 'Griechische Götterlehre,' vol. i. p. 220. Meiners, vol. i. p. 150, &c. Details esp. in Pausanias; Theophrast. Charact. xvi.; Tacit. Hist. ii. 3; Arnobius, Adv. Gent.; Tertullianus; Clemens Alexandr.
132. Is. lvii. 6. The first line, 'behhalkey-nahhal hhêlkech,' turns on the pun on hhlk=smooth (stone), and also lot or portion; a double sense probably connected with the use of smooth pebbles for casting lots.
133. Sprenger, 'Mohammad,' vol. ii. p. 7, &c. Burton, 'El Medinah,' &c., vol. ii. p. 157.
134. Euseb. Præp. Evang. i. 10. Deut. xii. 3; Micah v. 13, &c. Movers, 'Phönizier,' vol. i. pp. 105, 569, and see index, 'Säule,' &c. See De Brosses, 'Dieux Fétiches,' p. 135 (considers bætyl=beth-el, &c.).
135. For references see Ducange s.v. 'petra'; Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 256.
136. Nilsson, 'Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' p. 241. See also Meiners, vol. ii. p. 671 (speaking stones in Norway, &c.).
137. Earl of Roden, 'Progress of Reformation in Ireland,' London, 1851, p. 51. Sir J. E. Tennent in 'Notes and Queries,' Feb. 7, 1852. See Borlase, 'Antiquities of Cornwall,' Oxford, 1754, book iii. ch. 2.
138. 'Early Hist, of Mankind,' chap. vi.
139. For general collections of evidence, see especially Meiners, 'Geschichte der Religionen,' vol. i. books i. and v.; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii.; Waitz, 'Anthropologie;' De Brosses, 'Dieux Fétiches,' &c. Particular details in J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' p. 393; Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 395; Castrén, 'Finnische Mythologie,' p. 193, &c.; Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii.; Köppen, 'Rel. des Buddha,' vol. i. p. 493, &c.; Grote, 'Hist. of Greece.'
140. J. G. Müller, Amer. Urrelig.p. 263; Meiners, vol i..p, 163.
141. Loskiel, 'Ind. of N. A.' vol. i. p. 39. Smith, 'Virginia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 14. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 203; J. G. Müller, pp.. 95-8, 128.
142. Fernando Colombo, 'Vita del Amm. Cristoforo Colombo,' Venice, 1571, p. 127, &c.; and 'Life of Colon,' in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84. Herrera, dec. i. iii. 3. Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' pp. 421-4. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 384; J. G. Müller, pp. 171-6, 182, 210, 232.
143. Prescott, 'Peru,' vol. i. pp. 71, 89; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 458; J. G. Müller, pp. 322, 371.
144. Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 486; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 148; J. G. Müller, p. 642.
145. Shortland, 'Trads. of N. Z.' &c., p. 83; Taylor, pp. 171, 183, 212.
146. J. R. Forster, 'Obs. during Voyage,' London, 1778, p. 534, &c.; Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 281, &c., 323, &c. See also Earl, 'Papuans,' p. 84; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 78 (Nias).
147. St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 198.
148. Hutchinson in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 336; see Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 172.
149. Steinhauser, in 'Magaz. der Evang. Missionen,' Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 131.
150. Schlegel, 'Ewe-Sprache," p. xvi.
151. Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 183; Denham, 'Travels,' vol. i. p. 113; Römer, 'Guinea'; Bosman, 'Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. See also Livingstone, 'S. Afr.' p. 282 (Balonda).
152. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth,' p. 193, &c.; Bastian, 'Psych.' p. 34, 208, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. pp. 293, 486. See 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 350 (Chinese).
153. Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. i. p. xvii.; Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 198, vol. ii. pp. xxxv. 164, 234, 292, 485.
154. Arnobius Adversus Gentes, vi. 17-19.
155. Augustinus 'De Civ. Dei,' viii. 23: 'at ille visibilia et contrectabilia simulacra, velut corpora deorum esse asserit; inesse autem his quosdam spiritus invitatos, &c. ... Hos ergo spiritus invisibiles per artem quandam visibilibus rebus corporalis materiæ copulare, ut sint quasi animata corpora, illis spiritibus dicata et subdita simulacra, &c. See also Tertullianus De Spectaculis, xii.: 'In mortuorum autem idolis dæmonia consistunt, &c.'
156. Marcus Minucius Felix, Octavius, cap. xxvii.: 'Isti igitur impuri spiritus, dæmones, ut ostensum a magis, a philosophis, et a Platone sub statuis et imaginibus consecrati delitescunt, &c.'
157. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 455. See Spiegel, 'Avesta,' vol. ii. p. 54.
158. Porphyr. de Vita Pythagoræ. Oken, 'Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,' 2753.
159. 2