 Part 4 of the Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser being Chapter 4, Magic and Religion. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser, Chapter 4, Magic and Religion. These examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to which we have given the names of homeopathic and contagious, respectively. In some cases of magic which have come before us, we have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. For these cases are on the whole exceptional. They exhibit magic tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another, necessarily and invariably, without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science. Underlying the whole system is a faith implicit but real and firm in the order and uniformity of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony accompanied by the appropriate spell will inevitably be attended by the desired result, unless indeed his incantations should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power. He sews the favour of no fickle and wayward being. He abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art and to what may be called the rules of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure and may even expose the unskillful practitioner himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional sovereignty, rigorously limited in its scope and exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely. The elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanisms of the world. Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind. Hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary inquirer, the foot sore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future. They take him up to the top of an exceedingly high mountain and show him beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding pages and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely the association of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homeopathic or imitative magic, a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of association are excellent in themselves and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind, legitimately applied, they yield science, illegitimately applied, they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren, for were it ever to become true and faithful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great horde of such maxims, some of them golden, and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts, the false are magic. If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to inquire how it stands related to religion, but the view we take of that relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have formed of the nature of religion itself, hence a writer may reasonably be expected to define his conception of religion before he proceeds to investigate its relation to magic. There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy everyone must obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is first to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout his work. By religion then I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely a belief in powers higher than man, and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of the two belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him, but unless a belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology. In the language of St. James, faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. In other words, no man is religious who does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious. If the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral, according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. Hence, belief and practice, or in theological language, faith and works, are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always take the form of a ritual, and it is, it need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if the deity is one who delights in charity and mercy and purity, more than in oblations of blood, the chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves before him, by intoning his praises and by filling his temples with costly gifts, but by being pure and merciful and charitable towards men. For in so doing, they will imitate, so far as human infirmity allows, the perfections of the divine nature. It was this ethical side of religion, which the Hebrew prophets inspired with the noble ideal of God's goodness and holiness, were never weary of inculcating. Thus Micah says, He hath showed thee, O man, what is good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. And at a later time much of the force by which Christianity conquered the world was drawn from the same high conception of God's moral nature, and the duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it. Pure religion and undefiled, says St. James, before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their reflection, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. But if religion involves first a belief in superhuman beings who rule the world, and second an attempt to win their favour, it clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume that the processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their operation, and that they can as little be turned from their course by persuasion and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns on their answer to the crucial question, are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal or unconscious and impersonal. Religion as a conciliation of the superhuman powers assumes the former member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies that the being conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his conduct is in some measure uncertain, and that he can be prevailed upon to vary it in the desired direction by a judicious appeal to his interests, his appetites or his emotions. Conciliation is never employed towards things which are regarded as inanimate, nor towards persons whose behaviour, in the particular circumstances, is known to be determined with absolute certainty. Thus, in Safara's religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion. It stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for granted that the course of nature is determined not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically. In magic indeed the assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion, but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion would do. Thus, it assumes that all personal beings, whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those impersonal forces which control all things, but which nevertheless can be turned to account by anyone who knows how to manipulate them by the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient Egypt, for example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes without going quite so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved consumatious. Similarly in India at the present day, the great Hindu trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva is subject to the sorcerers, who by means of their spells exercise such an ascendancy over the mightiest deities that these are bound submissively to execute on earth below or in heaven above, whatever commands their masters the magicians may please to issue. There is a saying everywhere current in India, the whole universe is subject to the gods, the gods are subject to the spells, mantras, the spells to the Brahmins, therefore the Brahmins are our gods. This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history the priest has often pursued the magician, the haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom with his awful sense of divine majesty and his humble prostration in the presence of it such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an impious and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to God alone. And sometimes we may suspect lower motives concurred to wet the edge of the priest's hostility. He professed to be the proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and no doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often injured by a rival practitioner who preached a sureer and smoother road to fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour. Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an earlier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often combined or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet differentiated from each other. To serve his purpose man wooed the goodwill of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the help of God or Devil. In short he performed religious and magical rites simultaneously. He uttered prayers and incantations almost in the same breath, knowing or wrecking little of the theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour so long as by hook or crook he contrived to get what he wanted. Instances of this fusion or confusion of magic with religion have already met us in the practices of Melanesians and of other peoples. The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among peoples that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in ancient India and ancient Egypt. It is by no means extinct among European peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India we are told by an eminent Sanskrit scholar that the sacrificial ritual at the earliest period of which we have detailed information is pervaded with practices that breathe the spirit of the most primitive magic. Speaking of the importance of magic in the East and especially in Egypt Professor Maspero remarks that we ought not to attach to the word magic the degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a God had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity, and this arrest could only be affected by means of a certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers and chants which the God himself had revealed and which obliged him to do what was demanded of him. Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion of ideas, the same mixture of religion and magic crops up in various forms. Thus we are told that in France the majority of the peasant still believe that the priest possesses a secret and irresistible power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers which he alone knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of which he must afterwards demand absolution he can on an occasion of pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action of the eternal laws of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail and the rain are at his command and obey his will. The fire also is subject to him and the flames of a conflagration are extinguished at his word. For example French peasants used to be, perhaps are still, persuaded that the priests could celebrate with certain special rites, a mass of the Holy Spirit of which the efficacy was so miraculous that it never met with any opposition from the divine will. God was forced to grant whatever was asked of him in this form, however rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of imparty or irreverence attached to the right in the minds of those who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular priests generally refused to say the mass of the Holy Spirit, but the monks, especially the Capuchin friars, had the reputation of yielding with less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious and distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to be laid by the priest upon the deity, we seem to have an exact counterpart of the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their magicians. Again to take another example, in many villages of Provence, the priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of averting storms. It is not every priest to enjoy this reputation, and in some villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the parishioners are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the power, Poudre, as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy storm, they put him to the proof by inviting him to exercise the threatening clouds, and if the result answers to their hopes, the new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock. In some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this respect stood higher than that of his rector, the relations between the two have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had to translate the rector to another benefice. Again, Gaskon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies, bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Sansekail. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the Archbishop of Osh, can pardon them. That right belongs to the Pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Sansekail may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of knights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his lighter love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are kneeling the midnight hour. His lemon acts as his clerk. The host he blesses is black, and has three points. He consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptised infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground, and with his left foot, and many other things he does, which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind, and deaf, and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him. Even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the mass of Sansekail. Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such wants as transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first place, a consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and religion may incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the history of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary processes of the mind, namely the association of ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity, and that, on the other hand, religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal agents superior to man behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex than a simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas, and a theory which assumes that the course of nature is determined by conscious agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts associate the ideas of things that are like each other or that have been found together in their experience, and they could hardly survive for a day if they ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals, or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume that the honour of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human reason. Thus if magic be deduced immediately from elementary processes of reasoning, and be in fact an error into which the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests on conceptions which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic arose before religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and enchantments before he strove to coax and mollify a coy capricious or irascible deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice. The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is confirmed inductively by the observation that amongst the aborigines of Australia the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense of a propitiation or reconciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking all men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest. Everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice. But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase that they attempted to force the great powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of courting their favour by offerings and prayer. In short, that just as on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been an age of stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere been an age of magic. There are reasons for answering this question in the affirmative. When we survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but descend into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths, nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that the surface of society all over the world is cracked and seen, sacked and mined with wrents and fissures and yawning crevices opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind. One of the great achievements of the 19th century was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus to discover its substantial identity everywhere. It is beneath our feet, and not very far beneath them, here in Europe at the present day, and it crops up on the surface in the heart of the Australian wilderness, and wherever the advent of a higher civilisation has not crushed it on the ground. This universal faith, this truly catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of magic. While religious systems differ not only in different countries, but in the same country in different ages, the system of sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all times substantially alike in its principles and practice. Among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe, it is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is amongst the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world. If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or accounting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto quod semper, quod ubicue, quod ab omnibus, as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility. It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer whose studies have led him to plum its depths can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spurt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet. Now and then the polite world is startled by a paragraph in a newspaper which tells how in Scotland an image has been found stuck full of pins for the purpose of killing an obnoxious lair or minister, how a woman has been slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a girl has been murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade unseen. But whether the influences that make for further progress or those that threaten to undo what has already been accomplished will ultimately prevail, whether the impulsive energy of the minority or the dead weight of the majority of mankind will prove the stronger force to carry us up to the higher heights or to sink us into the lower depths are questions rather for the sage, the moralist and the statesman, whose eagle vision scans the future than for the humble student of the present and the past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the universality and the permanence of a belief in magic compared with the endless variety and the shifting character of religious creeds raises a presumption that the former represents a rudor and earlier phase of the human mind through which all the races of mankind have passed or are passing on their way to religion and science. If an age of religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise, been preceded by an age of magic, it is natural that we should inquire what causes have led mankind, or rather a portion of them, to abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to take themselves to religion instead. When we reflect upon the multitude, the variety and the complexity of the facts to be explained and the scantiness of our information regarding them, we shall be ready to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound a problem is hardly to be hoped for and that the most we can do in the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a more or less plausible conjecture. With all due diffidence then, I would suggest that a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account. The shrewder intelligences must in time have come to perceive that magical ceremonies and incantations did not really affect the results which they were designed to produce and which the majority of their simpler fellows still believed that they did actually produce. This great discovery of the inefficacy of magic must have brought a radical, though probably slow, revolution in the minds of those who had the sagacity to make it. The discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time recognized their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It was a confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for causes what were no causes and that all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain. His painful toil had been wasted, his curious ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to which nothing was attached, he had been marching as he thought straight to the goal, while in reality he had only been treading in a narrow circle. Not that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce did not continue to manifest themselves, they were still produced, but not by him. The rain still fell on the thirsty ground, the sun still pursued his daily and the moon her nightly journey across the sky. The silent procession of the season still moved in light and shadow, in cloud and sunshine across the earth. Men were still born to labor and sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were gathered to their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went on as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose eyes the old scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the pleasing illusion that it was he who guided the earth and the heavens in their great courses, and that they would cease to perform their great revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from the wheel. In the death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a proof of the resistless potency of his own or of hostile enchantments. He now knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force stronger than any that he could wield, and in obedience to a destiny which he was powerless to control. Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty his old happy confidence in himself and his powers rudely shaken. Our primitive philosopher must have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage in a new system of faith and practice which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts and a substitute however precarious for that sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows it must surely be because there were other beings like himself but far stronger who unseen themselves directed its course and brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic. It was they, as he now believed, and not he himself who made the stormy wind to blow, the lightning to flash, and the thunder to roll, who had laid the foundations of the solid earth and set bounds to the restless sea that it might not pass, who caused all the glorious lights of heaven to shine, who gave the fowls of the air their meat and the wild beasts of the desert their prey, who bade the fruitful land to bring forth in abundance the high hills to be clothed with forests, the bubbling springs to rise under the rocks in the valleys, and green pastures to grow by still waters, who breathed into man's nostrils and made him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and pestilence and war. To these mighty beings whose handiwork he traced in all the gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things, to defend him from the perils and dangers by which our mortal life is compassed about on every hand, and finally to bring his immortal spirit freed from the burden of the body to some happier world beyond the reach of pain and sorrow, where he might rest with them and with the spirits of good men in joy and felicity for ever. In this or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived to have made the great transition from magic to religion, but even in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden. Probably it proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more or less perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man's powerlessness to influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been gradual. He cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow. Step by step he must have been driven back from his proud position. Foot by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh, the ground which he had once viewed as his own. Now it would be the wind, now the rain, now the sunshine, now the thunder, that he confessed himself unable to wield at will, and as province after province of nature thus fell from his grasp, till what at once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison, man must have been more and more profoundly impressed with the sense of his own helplessness, and the might of the invisible beings by whom he believed himself to be surrounded. Thus religion, beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgement of power's superior to man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man's entire and absolute dependence on the Divine. His old free bearing is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit his will to theirs. But this deepening sense of religion, this more perfect submission to the divine will in all things, affects only those higher intelligences who have breadth of view enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas, to their narrow comprehension, their per-blind vision, nothing seems really great and important, but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all. They are indeed drilled by their betters into an outward conformity with its presets and a verbal profession of its tenets, but at heart they cling to their old magic or superstitions, which may be discountenanced and forbidden, but cannot be eradicated by religion, so long as they have their roots deep down into the mental framework and constitution of the great majority of mankind. The reader may well be tempted to ask, how was it that intelligent men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could they continue to cherish expectations that were invariably doomed to disappointment, with what heart persist in playing venerable antics that led to nothing and mumbling solemn balderdash that remained without effect? Why cling to beliefs which were so flatly contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat experiments that had failed so often? The answer seems to be that the fallacy was far from easy to detect, the failure by no means obvious, since in many, perhaps in most cases the desired event did actually follow, at a longer or shorter interval, the performance of the right which was designed to bring it about, and the mind of more than common acuteness was needed to perceive that even in these cases the right was not necessarily the cause of the event. A ceremony intended to make the wind blow or the rainfall or to work the death of an enemy will always be followed sooner or later by the occurrence it is meant to bring to pass, and a primitive man may be excused regarding the occurrence as a direct result of the ceremony and the best possible proof of its efficacy. Similarly, rights observed in the morning to help the sun to rise, and in spring to wake the dreaming earth from her winter sleep, when invariably appear to be crowned with success, at least within the temperate zones, for in these regions the sun lights his golden lamp in the east every morning, and year by year the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a rich mantle of green. Hence the practical savage with his conservative instincts may well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter, the philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and spring might not, after all, be direct consequences of the punctual performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom, though the ceremonies were occasionally intermitted or even discontinued altogether. These skeptical doubts would naturally be repelled by the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries, subversive of the faith, and manifestly contradicted by experience. Can anything be planer, he might say, than that I light my tuppany candle on earth, and that the sun then kindles his great fire in heaven? I should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe in spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same. These are facts patent to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic. Theories and speculation and all that may be very well in their way, and I have not the least objection to your indulging in them, provided, of course, you do not put them in practice. But give me leave to stick to facts, then I know where I am. The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up our minds. But let an argument of precisely the same caliber be applied to matters which are still under debate, and it may be questioned whether a British audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem the speaker who used it a safe man. Not brilliant or showy, perhaps, but thoroughly sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings could pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder that they long escape detection by the savage? 5. The Magical Control of the Weather Section 1. The Public Magician The reader may remember that we were led to plunge into the labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of man-god. This is the clue which has guided our devious steps through the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground, whence, resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path we have already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper road we have still to climb. As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human gods may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the magical man-god, respectively. In the former, a being of an order different from and superior to man is supposed to become incarnate. For a longer or shorter time in a human body, manifesting a superhuman power and knowledge by miracle rot and prophecies uttered through the medium of the fleshy tabernacle in which he has dain to take up his abode. This may also appropriately be called the inspired or incarnate type of man-god. In it, the human body is merely a frail, earthly vessel filled with a divine and immortal spirit. On the other hand, a man-god of the magical sort is nothing but a man who possesses in an unusually high degree powers which most of his fellows irrigate to themselves on a smaller scale. For in rude society, there is hardly a person who does not dabble in magic. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to hide his heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mold, a man-god of the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a certain physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the receptacle of a divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so delicately attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through the universal framework of things, and conversely, his divine organism is acutely sensitive to such slight changes of environment as would leave ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows I shall not insist on it. We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that according, as it is directed to one or other of these two objects, it may be called private or public magic. Further, I pointed out that the public magician occupies a position of great influence from which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by step to the rank of a chief or king. Thus, an examination of public magic conduces to an understanding of the early kingship, since in savage and barbarous society, many chiefs and kings appear to owe their authority in great measure to the reputation as magicians. Among the objects of public utility, which magic may be employed to secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food. The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of food, the hunter, the fisher, the farmer, all resort to magical practices in the pursuit of their various callings, but they do so as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their families, rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest of the whole people. It is otherwise when the rites are performed not by the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by professional magicians on their behalf. In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician. He practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies. But a great step in advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has been instituted, when, in other words, a number of men have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing of disease, the forecasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged to prosecute researchers into the secret ways of nature. It was at once their duty and their interest to know more than their fellows to acquaint themselves with everything that could aid man in his arduous struggle with nature, everything that could mitigate his sufferings and prolong his life. The properties of drugs and minerals, the causes of rain and drought, of thunder and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the faces of the moon, the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars, the mysteries of life, and the mystery of death. All these things must have excited the wonder of these early philosophers and stimulated them to find solutions of their problems that were doubtless often thrust on their attention in the most practical form by the important demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand, but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man. That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at the time seemed to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd, yet in their day they were legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of experience. Ridicule and blame are the just mead not of those who devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered to them after better had been propounded. Certainly, no men had stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these savage sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely necessary. A single mistake detected might cost them their life. This no doubt led them to practice imposture for the purpose of concealing their ignorance, but it also supplied them with the most powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is actually to know it. Thus, however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions which they have practiced on mankind, the original institution of this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of incalculable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science. They began the work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent issues by their successors in after ages. And if their beginning was poor and feeble, this is to be imputed to the inevitable difficulties which beset the path of knowledge rather than to the natural incapacity or willful fraud of the men themselves. Of the things which the public magician sets himself to do for the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather and especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain. Water is an essential of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends upon showers. Without rain, vegetation withers, animal and men languish and die. Hence in savage communities the rainmaker is a very important personage, and often a special class of magicians exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water supply. The methods by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are commonly, though not always, based on the principle of homeopathic or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain, they simulate it by sprinkling water or mimicking clouds. If their object is to stop rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture. Such attempts are by no means confined, as the cultivated reader might imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those sultry lands like Central Australia and some parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, where often for months together the pitiless sun beats down out of the blue and cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth. They are, or used to be, common enough among outwardly civilized folk in the moisture climate of Europe. I will now illustrate them by instances drawn from the practice both of public and private magic. Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpot in Russia, when rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir trees of an old sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small cask to imitate thunder. The second knocked two firebrands together and made the sparks fly to imitate lightening, and the third, who was called the rainmaker, had a bunch of twigs with which he sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides. To put an end to drought and bring down rain, women and girls of the village of Ploska are want to go naked by night to the boundaries of the village and their poor water on the ground. In Halmahera, or Galolo, a large island to the west of New Guinea, a wizard makes rain by dipping a branch of a particular kind of tree in water, and then scattering the moisture from the dripping bow over the ground. In New Britain, the rainmaker wraps some leaves of a red and green striped creeper in a banana leaf, moistened the bundle with water, and buries it in the ground. Then he imitates with his mouth the plashing of rain. Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America, when the corn is withering for want of rain, the members of the Sacred Buffalo Society fill a large vessel with water and dance four times round it. One of them drinks some of the water and spirits it into the air, making a fine spray an imitation of a mist or drizzling rain. Then he upsets the vessel, spilling the water on the ground, whereupon the dancers fall down and drink up the water, getting mud all over their faces. Lastly, they squirt the water into the air, making a fine mist. This saves the corn. In springtime, the Naches of North America used to club together to purchase favorable weather for their crops from the wizards. If rain was needed, the wizards fasted and danced with pipes full of water in their mouths. The pipes were perforated like the nozzle of a watering can, and through the holes, the rainmaker blew the water towards that part of the sky where the clouds hung heaviest. But if fine weather was wanted, he mounted the roof of his hut, and with extended arms, blowing with all his might, he beckoned to the clouds to pass by. When the rains do not come and do season, the people of Central Angonaland repair to what is called the rain temple. Here they clear away the grass, and the leader pours beer into a pot which is buried in the ground, while he says, Master Chowta, you have hardened your heart towards us. What would you have us do? We must perish indeed. Give your children the rains, there is beer we have given you. Then they all partake of the beer that is left over, even the children being made to sip it. Next they take branches of trees and dance and sing for rain. When they return to the village, they find a vessel of water set at the doorway by an old woman, so they dip their branches in it and wave them aloft, so as to scatter the drops. After that, the rain is sure to come, driving up in heavy clouds. In these practices we see a combination of religion with magic, for while the scattering of the water drops by means of branches is a purely magical ceremony, the prayer for rain and the offering of beer are purely religious rites. In the Mara tribe of Northern Australia, the rainmaker goes to a pool and sings over it his magic song. Then he takes some of the water in his hands, drinks it, and spits it out in various directions. After that, he throws water all over himself, scatters it about, and returns quietly to the camp. Rain is supposed to follow. The Arab historian Makrizzi describes a method of stopping rain which is said to have been resorted to by a tribe of nomads called Alkamar in Hadramout. They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert, set it on fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water. After that the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water vanished when it fell on the glowing brand. Some of the eastern Angamis of Manipur are said to perform a somewhat similar ceremony for the opposite purpose, in order, namely, to produce rain. The head of the village puts a burning brand on the grave of a man who has died of burns, and quenches the brand with water, while he prays that rain may fall. Here, the putting out the fire with water, which is an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his pangs. Other people besides the Arabs have used fire as a means of stopping rain. Thus, the Salka of New Britain heats stones red-hot in the fire and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes in the air. They think that the rain will soon cease to fall, for it does not like to be burned by the hot stones or ashes. The Tolugus send a little girl out naked into the rain with a burning piece of wood in her hand, which she has to show to the rain. That is supposed to stop the downpour. At Port Stevens in New South Wales, the medicine men used to drive away rain by throwing fire sticks into the air, while at the same time they puffed and shouted. Any man of the Annula tribe in northern Australia can stop rain by simply warming a green stick in the fire, then striking it against the wind. In time of severe drought, the De area of central Australia, loudly lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own half-starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote predecessors, whom they call Mura Muras, to grant them power to make a heavy rainfall. For they believe that the clouds are bodies in which rain is generated by their own ceremonies or those of neighbouring tribes, through the influence of the Mura Muras. The way in which they set about drawing rain from the clouds is this. A hole is dug about twelve feet long and eight or ten broad, and over this hole a conical hut of logs and branches is made. Two wizards, supposed to have received a special inspiration from the Mura Muras, are bled by an old and influential man with a sharp flint, and the blood, drawn from their arms below the elbow, is made to flow on the other men of the tribe who sit huddled together in the hut. At the same time, the two bleeding men throw handfuls of down about, some of which adheres to the blood-stained bodies of their comrades, while the rest floats in the air. The blood is thought to represent the rain and the down the clouds. During the ceremony, two large stones are placed in the middle of the hut. They stand for gathering clouds and presage rain. Then the wizards who are bled carry away the two stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as they can in the tallest tree. Meanwhile, the other men gather gypsum, pound it fine, and throw it into a water hole. This the Mura Muras see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky. Lastly, the men, young and old, surround the hut and stoop down, but at it with their heads, like so many rams. Thus, they force their way through it and reappear on the other side, repeating the process till the hut is wrecked. In doing this, they are forbidden to use their hands or arms, but when the heavy logs alone remain, they are allowed to pull them out with their hands. The piercing of the hut with their head symbolizes the piercing of the clouds, the fall of the hut, the fall of the rain. Obviously too, the act of placing high up in the trees the two stones, which stand for clouds, is a way of making the real clouds to mount up in the sky. The diaries also imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision have a great power of producing rain. Hence, the great council of the tribe always keeps a small stock of foreskins ready for use. They are carefully concealed, being wrapped up in feathers with the fat of the wild dog and of the carpet snake. A woman may not see such a parcel opened on any account. When the ceremony is over, the foreskin is buried, its virtue being exhausted. After the rains have fallen, some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation, which consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a sharp flint. The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase the flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it. Raised scars are thus produced. The reason alleged by the natives for this practice is that they are pleased with the rain, and that there is a connection between the rain and the scars. Apparently the operation is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes while it is going on. Indeed, little children have been seen to crowd around the operator and patiently take their turn. Then, after being operated on, they ran away, expanding their little chests and singing for the rain to beat upon them. However, they were not so well pleased next day when they felt their wounds stiff and sore. In Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs. The streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground. The people of Egu, a district of Abyssinia, used to engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other village against village for a week together every January for the purpose of procuring rain. Some years ago, the Emperor Menelik forbade the custom. However, the following year the rain was deficient, and the popular outcry so great that the Emperor yielded to it and allowed the murderous fights to be resumed, but for two days a year only. The writer who mentions the custom regards the bloodshed on these occasions as a propitiatory sacrifice offered to spirits who control the showers. But perhaps, as in the Australian and Javanese ceremonies, it is an imitation of rain. The prophets of Baal, who sought to procure rain by cutting themselves with knives till the blood gushed out, may have acted on the same principle. There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather. This curious superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular restrictions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure. Thus, the Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the weather, therefore they pray to wind and rain, calm down breath of the twins. Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always fulfilled, hence twins are feared because they can harm the man they hate. They can also call the salmon and the Olukchen or candlefish, so that they are known by a name which means making plentiful. In the opinion of the Kwak-Yurl Indians of British Columbia, twins are transformed salmon, hence they may not go near water, lest they should be changed back again into the fish. In their childhood, they can summon any wind by motions of their hands, and they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by swinging a large wooden rattle. The Newtka Indians of British Columbia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon. Hence, among them, twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or even handle the fresh fish. They can make fair or foul weather, and can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black, and then washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds. The ShoeSwap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them young grizzly bears. According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with supernatural powers. In particular, they can make good or bad weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the air. They make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood attached to a stick by a string. They raise storms by stirring down on the ends of spruce branches. The same power of influencing the weather is attributed to the twins by the Buranga, a tribe of Bantu Negroes who inhabit the shores of the Delagoa Bay in southeastern Africa. They bestow the name of Tilo, that is, the sky, on a woman who has given birth to twins, and the infants themselves are called the children of the sky. Now, when the storms which have generally burst in the months of September and October have been looked for in vain, when a drought with its prospect of famine is threatening, and all nature, scorched and burnt up by a sun that has shown for six months from a cloudless sky, is panting for the beneficent showers of the South African Spring, the women perform ceremonies to bring down the longed for rain on the parched earth. Stripping themselves of all their garments, they assume in their stead girdles and headdresses of grass or short petticoats made of the leaves of a particular sort of creeper. Thus attired, uttering peculiar cries and singing ribbled songs, they go about from well to well, cleansing them of the mud and impurities which have accumulated in them. The wells, it may be said, are merely holes in the sand where a little turbid unwholesome water stagnates. Further, the women must repair to the house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drencher with water which they carry in little pitchers. Having done so, they go on their way, shrieking at their loose songs and dancing immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad women going on their rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him aside. When they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It often happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the graves of twins. For they think that the grave of a twin ought always to be moist, for which reason twins are regularly buried near a lake. If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive, they will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill. No wonder, says the wizard in such a case, that the sky is fiery, take up his body and dig him a grave on the shore of the lake. His orders are at once obeyed, for this is supposed to be the only means of bringing down the rain. Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which Professor Oldenburg has given of the rules to be observed by a Brahmin who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian collection known as the Samaveda. The hymn, which bears the name of the Sakveri song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt, and hence, on account of the dreadful and dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow men and to retire from the village into the forest. Here, for a space of time, which might vary according to different doctors of the law, from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life, among which were the following. Thrice a day, he had to touch water. He must wear black garments and eat black food. When it rained, he might not seek the shelter of a roof, but had to sit in the rain and say, Water is the Sakveri song. When the lightning flashed, he said, That is like the Sakveri song. When the thunder peeled, he said, The great one is making a great noise. Thrice a day, he might never cross a running stream without touching water. He might never set foot on a ship unless his life were in danger, and even then he must be sure to touch water when he went on board. For in water, so ran the sang, lies the virtue of the Sakveri song. When at last, he was allowed to learn the song itself, he had to dip his hand in a vessel of water in which plants of all sorts had been placed. If a man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain god Parjanya, it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man. It is clear, as Professor Oldenburgwell points out, that all these rules are intended to bring the Brahmin into union with water, to make him, as it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their hostility. The black garments and the black food had the same significance. No one will doubt that they refer to the rain clouds when he remembers that a black victim is sacrificed to procure rain. It is black for such as the nature of rain. In respect of another rain charm, it is said plainly, he puts on a black garment edged with black for such as the nature of rain. We may therefore assume that here in the circle of ideas and ordinances of the Vedic schools, there have been preserved magical practices of the most remote antiquity, which were intended to prepare the rainmaker for his office and dedicate him to it. It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather doctor to observe precisely opposite rules of conduct. In the tropical island of Java, where the rich vegetation attests the abundance of the rainfall, ceremonies for the making of rain are rare, but ceremonies for the prevention of it are not uncommon. When a man is about to give a great feast in the rainy season and has invited many people, he goes to a weather doctor and asks him to prop up the clouds that may be lowering. If the doctor consents to exert his professional powers, he begins to regulate his behavior by certain rules as soon as his customer has departed. He must observe a fast and may neither drink nor bathe. What little he eats must be eaten dry, and in no case may he touch water. The host on his side and his servants, both male and female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so long as the feast lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict chastity. The doctor seats himself on a new mat in his bedroom, and before a small oil lamp he murmurs shortly before the feast takes place, the following prayer or incantation. Grandfather and grandmother strokele, the name seems to be taken at random, others are sometimes used, return to your country, Akimat is your country. Put down your water cask, close it properly that not a drop may fall out. While he utters this prayer, the sorcerer looks upwards, burning incense the while. So among the tarajas, the rain doctor, whose special business it is to drive away rain, takes care not to touch water before, during, or after the discharge of his professional duties. He does not bathe, he eats with unwashed hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if he has to cross a stream, he is careful not to step in the water. Having thus prepared himself for his task, he has a small hut built for himself outside of the village in a rice field, and in this hut he keeps up a little fire, which on no account may be suffered to go out. In the fire he burns various kinds of wood, which are supposed to possess the property of driving off rain, and he puffs in the direction from which the rain threatens to come, holding in his hand a packet of leaves and bark, which derive a similar cloud-compelling virtue, not from their chemical composition but from their names, which happen to signify something dry or volatile. If clouds should appear in the sky while he is at work, he takes lime in the hollow of his hand and blows it towards them. The lime, being so very dry, is obviously well adapted to disperse damp clouds. Should rain afterwards be wanted, he has only to pour water on his fire, and immediately the rain will descend in sheets. The reader will observe how exactly the Javanese and Taraja observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the antithesis of the Indian observances which aim at producing it. The Indian sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly, as well as on various special occasions. The Javanese and Taraja wizards may not touch it at all. The Indian lives out in the forest, and even when it rains he may not take shelter. The Javanese and Taraja sit in a house or hut. The one signifies his sympathy with water by receiving the rain on his person, and speaking of it respectfully. The others light a lamp or a fire and do their best to drive the rain away. Yet the principle on which all three act is the same. Each of them, by a sort of childish make-believe, identifies himself with the phenomenon which he desires to produce. It is the old fallacy that the effect resembles its cause. If you would make wet weather, you must be wet. If you would make dry weather, you must be dry. In southeastern Europe, at the present day, ceremonies are observed for the purpose of making rain, which not only rest on the same general train of thought as the proceeding, but even in their details resemble the ceremonies practiced with the same intention by the Baronga of Delagoa Bay. Among the Greeks of Thessaly and Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs of the neighborhood. At the head of the procession walks a girl adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at every halting place, while they sing an invocation of which the following is part. Perperia all fresh bedued, fresh in all the neighborhood. By the woods on the highway, as thou goest to God now pray, O my God, upon the plain, Send thou us a still small rain. That the fields may fruitful be, and vines and blossoms we may see, that the grain be full in sound, and wealthy grow the folks around. In time of drought, the Serbian stripper girl to her skin and clothe her from head to foot in grass, herbs, and flowers, even her face being hidden behind a veil of living green. Thus disguised, she is called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troupe of girls. They stop before every house. The Dodola keeps turning herself round and dancing, while the other girls form a ring about her singing one of the Dodola's songs, and the housewife pours a pail of water over her. One of the songs they sing runs thus. We go through the village, the clouds go in the sky. We go faster, faster go the clouds. They have overtaken us, and wetted the corn and the vine. At Pune in India, when rain is needed, the boys dress up one of their number in nothing but leaves, and call him King of Rain. Then they go round to every house in the village, where the householder or his wife sprinkles the rain king with water, and gives the party food of various kinds. When they have thus visited all the houses, they strip the rain king of his leafy robes and feast upon what they have gathered. Bathing is practiced as a rain charm in some parts of southern and western Russia. Sometimes after service in church, the priest in his robes has been thrown down on the ground and drenched with water by his parishioners. Sometimes it is the women who, without stripping off their clothes, bathe in the crowds on the day of Saint John the Baptist, while they dip in the water a figure made of branches, grass, and herbs, which is supposed to represent the saint. In Kursk, a province of southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river or souse him from head to foot. Later on, we shall see that a passing stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some natural power. It is recorded in official documents that during a drought in 1790 the peasants of Shirauts and Wurboats collected all the women and compelled them to bathe in order that rain might fall. An Armenian rain charm is to throw the wife of a priest into the water and drencher. The Arabs of North Africa fling a holy man willy-nilly into a spring as a remedy for drought. In Minhasa, a province of north Celebes, the priest bathes as a rain charm. In central Celebes, where there has been no rain for a long time, and the rice stalks begin to shrivel up, many of the villagers, especially the young folk, go to a neighboring brook and splash each other with water, shouting noisily, or squirt water on one another through bamboo tubes. Sometimes they imitate the plump of rain by smacking the surface of the water with their hands, or by placing an inverted gourd on it and drumming on the gourd with their fingers. Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by plowing or pretending to plow, thus the bshas and choosers of the Caucasus have a ceremony called plowing the rain, which they observe in time of drought. Girls yoke themselves to a plow and drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles. In the same circumstances Armenian girls and women do the same. The oldest woman, or the priest's wife, wears the priest's dress while the others, dressed as men, drag the plow through the water against the stream. In the Caucasian province of Georgia, when a drought has lasted long, marriageable girls are yoked in couples with an ox yoke on their shoulders. The priest holds the reins, and thus harnessed they wade through rivers, puddles, and marshes, praying, screaming, weeping, and laughing. In a district of Transylvania, when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the field to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow, and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go home. A similar rain charm is resorted to in some parts of India. Naked women drag a plow across the field by night, while the men keep carefully out of the way, for their presence would break the spell. Sometimes the rain charm operates through the dead, thus in New Caldonia the rain makers blacken themselves all over, dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the deceased took upon the water, converted it into rain, and showered it down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not long since the peasants of any district that chance to be afflicted with drought used to dig up the corpse of someone who had drunk himself to death and sink it into the nearest swamp or lake. Fully persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In 1868, the prospect of a bad harvest caused by a prolonged drought induced the inhabitants of a village in the Teroshansk district to dig up the body of Raskolnik, or dissenter, who had died in the preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was left of it, about the head exclaiming, give us rain, while others poured water on it through a sieve. Here, the pouring of water through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds us of the manner in which Strepsiades and Aristophanes imagined that rain was made by Zeus. Sometimes, in order to procure rain, the Tarajas made an appeal to the pity of the dead. Thus, in the village of Kalungoa, there is a grave of a famous chief, the grandfather of the present ruler. When the land suffers from unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave, pour water on it, and say, oh, grandfather, have pity on us. If it is your will that this year we should eat, then give rain. After that, they hang a bamboo full of water over the grave. There is a small hole in the lower end of the bamboo so that water drips from it continually. The bamboo is always refilled with water until rain drenches the ground. Here, as in New Caldonia, we find religion blend with magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely religious, is eked out with a magical imitation of rain at his grave. We have seen that the Baronga of Delagoa Bay drenched the tomes of their ancestors, especially the tomes of twins, as a rain charm. Among some of the Indian tribes in the region of the Orinoco, it was customary for the relations of a deceased person to dissenter his bones a year after burial, burn them, and scatter the ashes to the winds, because they believed that the ashes were changed into rain, which the dead men sent in return for his obsequies. The Chinese are convinced that when human bodies remain unburied, the souls of their late owners feel the discomfort of rain, just as living men would do if they were exposed without shelter to the inclinancy of the weather. These wretched souls therefore do all in their power to prevent the rain from falling, and often their efforts are only too successful. Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities in China, because bad harvests, dirt, and famine follow in its train. Hence it has been common practice of the Chinese authorities in time of drought to ensure the dry bones of the unburied dead for the purpose of putting an end to the scourge and conjuring down the rain. Animals, again, often play an important part in these weather charms. The Inula tribe of Northern Australia associate the dollar bird with rain and call it the rain bird. A man who has the bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water for a time, takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass docks in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that, all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow. Sooner or later, the rain will fall. They explain this procedure by saying that long ago the dollar bird has, as it made at this spot, a snake who lived in the pool and used to make rain by spinning up into the sky till a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell. A common way of making rain in many parts of Java is to bathe a cat or two cats, a male and a female. Sometimes the animals are carried in procession with music. Even in Batavia, you may from time to time see children going about with a cat for this purpose, when they have ducted in a pool, they let it go. Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright sunshine, and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in which the people live together. Then he slits the stomachs of the animals and scatters their contents in all directions. After that he pours water and medicine into a vessel. If the charm has succeeded, the water boils up and rain follows. On the other hand, if the sorcerer wishes to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws into the interior of the hut, and there heats a rock crystal in a kalabash. In order to procure rain, the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls, black sheep, and black cattle at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rainmaker wears black clothes during the rainy season. Among the Madabale, the rain charm employed by sorcerers was made from the blood and gall of a black ox. In a district of Sumatra, in order to procure rain, all the women of the village scantily clad go to the river, wade into it, and splash each other with the water. A black cat is thrown into the stream and made to swim about for a while, then allowed to escape to the bank pursued by the splashing of the women. The Garros of Assam offers a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in time of drought. In all these cases, the color of the animal is part of the charm. Being black, it will darken the sky with rain clouds, so the Betuanas burn the stomach of an ox at evening because they say the black smoke will gather the clouds and cause the rain to come. The Timorese sacrifice a black pig to the earth goddess for rain, a white or red one to the sun god for sunshine. The Angoni sacrifice a black ox for rain, and a white one for fine weather. Among the high mountains of Japan, there is a district in which, if the rain has not fallen for a long time, a party of villagers goes in procession to the bed of a mountain torrent headed by a priest who leads a black dog. At the chosen spot, they tether the beast to a stone and make it a target for their bullets and arrows. When its lifeblood bespatters the rocks, the peasants throw down their weapons and lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down forthwith a shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement. Customists prescribe that on these occasions, the color of the victim shall be black as an emblem of the wished four rain clouds, but if fine weather is wanted, the victim must be white without a spot. The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has earned for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of rain, and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw needed showers from the sky. Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that reason feared to kill the creature. They have been known to keep frogs under a pot and to beat them with rods when there was a drought. It is said that the Imara Indians often make little images of frogs and other aquatic animals and place them on the tops of the hills as a means of bringing down rain. The tops and Indians of British Columbia and some people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to fall. In order to procure rain, people of the low caste in the central provinces of India will tie a frog to a rod covered with green leaves and branches of the nim tree, and carry it from door to door singing, send soon oh frog the jewel of water, and ripen the wheat and mill it in the field. The capis or reddies are a large caste of cultivators and landowners in the Madras presidency. When rain falls, women of the caste will catch a frog and tie it alive to a new winnowing fan made of bamboo. On this fan they spread a few Margosa leaves and go from door to door singing, Lady Frog must have her bath, oh rain god give a little water for her at least. While the capu women sing this song, the women of the house pours water over the frog and gives alms, convinced that by doing so she will soon bring rain down in torrents. Sometimes when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the usual hocus pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too angry to waste their breath in prayer, they seek by threats and curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity has long been deaf to the peasants' prayers for rain, they at last threw down his image and, with curses loud and long, hurled it head foremost into a stinking rice field. There, they said, you may stay yourself for a while to see how you will feel after a few days scorching in this broiling sun that is burning the life from our cracking fields. In the like circumstances, the Philopes of Senangambia cast down their fetishes and drag them about the fields, cursing them till rain falls. The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm. Thus, when rain is wanted, they make a huge dragon of paper or wood to represent the rain god, and carry it about in procession. But if no rain follows, the mock dragon is executed and torn to pieces. At other times, they threaten and beat the god if he does not give rain. Sometimes, they publicly depose him from the rank of deity. On the other hand, if the wished for rain falls, the god is promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree. In April, 1888, the mandarins of Canton pray to the god, to stop the incessant downpour of rain. And when he turned up a deaf ear to their petitions, they put him in a lock-up for five days. This had a salutary effect. The rain ceased, and the god was restored to liberty. Some years before, in time of drought, the same deity has been chained and exposed to the sun for days in the courtyard of his temple, in order that he might feel for himself the urgent need of rain. So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in the blazing sun. But if they want dry weather, they unroof the temples and let the rain pour down on the idols. They think that the inconvenience to which the gods are thus subjected will induce them to grant the wishes of their worshippers. The reader may smile at the meteorology of the far east, but precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in Christian Europe within our own lifetime. By the end of April 1893, there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water. The drought had lasted six months. Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of cloudless blue. The gardens of Concordoro, which surround Palermo, with a magnificent belt of verger, were withering. Food was becoming scarce. The people were in great alarm. All the most approved methods of procuring rain had been tried without effect. Processions had traversed the streets and the fields. Men, women and children, telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the holy images. Consecrated candles had burned day and night in the churches. Palm branches, blessed on Palm Sunday, had been hung on the trees. At Sola Peruta, in accordance with a very old custom, the dust swept from the churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the fields. In ordinary years, these holy sweepings preserved the crops, but that year, if you will believe me, they had no effect whatever. At Nicosia, the inhabitants, bare-headed and barefoot, carried the crucifixes through all the wards of the town and scourged each other with iron whips. It was all in vain. Even the great Saint Francis of Palo himself, who annually performs the miracle of rain and is carried every spring through the market gardens, either could not or would not help. Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations, fireworks, nothing could move him. At last, the peasants began to lose patience. Most of the saints were banished. At Palermo, they dumped Saint Joseph in a garden to see the state of things for himself, and they swore to leave him there in the sun till rain fell. Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their faces to the wall. Others, again, stripped of their beautiful robes, were exiled far from their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted, ducked in horseponds. At Colton Ascetta, the golden wings of Saint Michael the Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with wings of pasteboard. His purple mantle was taken away, and a clot wrapped about him instead. At Licata, the patron saint, St. Angelo, fared even worse, for he was left without any garments at all. He was reviled, he was put in irons, he was threatened with drowning or hanging. Rain or rope roared the angry people at him as they shook their fists in his face. Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods. When their corn is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a heaven bird, kill it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heaven melts with tenerness for the death of the bird. It wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail. In Zululand, women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the sight. Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon follow. They say that they call to the Lord above and ask him to send rain. If it comes, they declare that Usando rains. In times of drought, the guanches of Tenerife led their sheep to sacred ground, and there they separated the lambs from their dams, that their plaintive bleeding might touch the heart of the god. In Kumau, a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil in the left ear of a dog. The animal howls with pain, his howls are heard by Indra, and out of pity for the beast's sufferings the god stops the rain. Sometimes the Tarajas attempt to procure rain as follows. They place the stalks of certain plants in water, saying, Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain falls, I will not plant you again, but there shall you die. Also they string some fresh water snails on a cord, and hang the cord on a tree, and say to the snails, Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain comes, I will not take you back to the water. Then the snails go and weep, and the gods take pity and send rain. However, the foregoing ceremonies are religious rather than magical, since they involve an appeal to the compassion of higher powers. Stones are often supposed to possess the property of bringing on rain, provided they be dipped in water or sprinkled with it, or treated in some other appropriate manner. In a Samoan village, a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making god, and in time of drought, his priests carried the stone in procession and dipped it in a stream. Among the Tatati tribe of New South Wales, the rainmaker breaks off a piece of quartz crystal and spits it towards the sky. The rest of the crystal he wraps in emu feathers, soaks both crystal and feathers in water, and carefully hides them. In the Keramin tribe of New South Wales, the wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round flat stone, then covers up and conceals it. Among some tribes of northwestern Australia, the rainmaker repairs to a piece of ground which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making. There he builds a heap of stones or sand, places it on the top of it, his magic stone, and walks or dances around the pile, chanting his incantations for hours, till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when his place is taken by his assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed. When the sulka of New Britain wished to procure rain, they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits, and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds in the sun. Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighed with stones, while a spell is chanted. After that, rain should follow. In Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a stone which the popular imagination likens to an umbrella. When rain is wanted, the Rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles it on the stone. At Sagami in Japan, there is a stone which draws down rain whenever water is poured on it. When the Wakonjo, a tribe of Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the Wawamba, who dwell at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a rainstone. In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba washed the precious stone, anointed with oil, and put it in a pot full of water. After that, the rain cannot fail to come. In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico, the Apache sought to make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular point high up on a rock. After that, they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain would begin to fall. But the customs of this sort are not confined to the wilds of Africa and Asia, or the torrid deserts of Australia and the New World. They have been practiced in the cool air and under the gray skies of Europe. There is a fountain called Barrington of Romantic fame in those wild woods of Bricelliande, where, if legend be true, the wizard Merlin still sleeps his magic slumber in the Hawthorne Shade. Tithe are the Breton peasants used to resort when they needed rain. They caught some of the water and tankered and threw it on a slab near the spring. On Snowden, there is a lonely tarn called Dullin, or the Black Lake, lying in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and dangerous rocks. A row of stepping stones runs out into the lake, and if anyone steps on the stones and throws water, so as to wet the farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, it is but a chance that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather. In these cases, it appears probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as more or less divine. This appears from the customs sometimes observed of dipping across in the fountain of Barrington to procure rain, for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the old pagan way of throwing water on the stone. At various places in France, it is, or used to tell lately to be, the practice to dip the image of a saint in water as means of procuring rain. Thus, beside the old prairie of Comigny, there is a spring of Saint Gervais, whether the inhabitants go in procession to obtain rain or fine weather according to the needs of the crops. In times of great drought, they throw into the basin of the fountain an ancient stone image of the saint that stands in a sort of niche from which the fountain flows. At Colobrieres and Carpentras, a similar practice was observed with the images of Saint Pons and Saint Genes, respectively. In several villages of Navarre, prayers for rain used to be offered to Saint Peter, and by way of enforcing them, the villagers carried the image of the saint in procession to the river, where they thrice invited him to reconsider his resolution and to grant their prayers. Then, if he was still obstinate, they plunged him in the water, despite the remonstrances of the clergy, who pleaded with as much truth as piety that a simple caution or admonition administered to the image would produce an equally good effect. After this, the rain was sure to fall within 24 hours. Catholic countries do not enjoy a monopoly of making rain by ducking holy images in water. In Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a shower falls, and in the far east, the shahns drench the images of Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all such cases, the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm. However, it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or a threat. Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain by magic when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual. For example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain spring on Mount Lyceus. Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land. A similar mode of making rain is still practiced, as we have seen, in Halmahera, near New Guinea. The people of Cranon and Thessaly had a bronze chariot which they kept in a temple. When they desired a shower, they shook the chariot and the shower fell. Probably the rattling of the chariot was meant to imitate thunder. We have already seen that mock thunder and lightning formed part of a rain charm in Russia and Japan. The legendary Salmoneus, king of Ellus, made mock thunder by dragging bronze kettles behind his chariot, or by driving over a bronze bridge, while he hurled blazing torches in imitation of lightning. It was his impious wish to mimic the thundering car of Zeus, as it rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed he declared that he was actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as such. Near a temple of Mars, outside the walls of Rome, there was kept a certain stone known as the Lapis Minalis. In time of drought, the stone was dragged into Rome, and this was supposed to bring down rain immediately. Chapter 5, sections 3 and 4 of The Golden Bough. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser. Chapter 5. The Magical Control of the Weather. Section 3. The Magical Control of the Sun. As the magician thinks he can make rain, so he fancies he can cause the sun to shine, and can hasten or stay its going down. At an eclipse the Ojibwe's used to imagine that the sun was being extinguished, so they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping thus to rekindle his expiring light. The sensees of Peru also shot burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but apparently they did this not so much to relight his lamp, as to drive away a savage beast with which they supposed him to be struggling. Conversely, during an eclipse of the moon, some tribes of the Orinoco used to bury lighted brands in the ground, because, said they, if the moon were to be extinguished, all fire on earth would be extinguished with her, except such as was hidden from her sight. During an eclipse of the sun, the Kamchatkans were want to bring out fire from their huts and pray the great luminary to shine as before. But the prayer addressed to the sun shows that this ceremony was religious rather than magical. Purely magical, on the other hand, was the ceremony observed on similar occasions by the Chilkotan Indians. Men and women tucked up their robes, as they do in traveling, and then leaning on staves, as if they were heavy laden, they continued to walk in a circle till the eclipse was over. Apparently they thought thus to support the failing steps of the sun as he trod his weary round in the sky. Similarly, in ancient Egypt, the king, as the representative of the sun, walked solemnly round the walls of a temple, in order to ensure that the sun should perform his daily journey round the sky, without the interruption of an eclipse or other mishap. And after the autumnal equinox, the ancient Egyptians held a festival called the Nativity of the Sun's Walking-Stick, because as the luminary declined daily in the sun, and his light and heat diminished, he was supposed to need a staff on which to lean. In New Caledonia, when a wizard desires to make sunshine, he takes some plants and corals to the burial ground, and fashions them into a bundle, adding two locks of hair cut from a living child of his family, also two teeth or an entire jawbone from the skeleton of an ancestor. He then climbs a mountain whose top catches the first rays of the morning sun. Here he deposits three sorts of plants on a flat stone, places a branch of dry coral beside them, and hangs the bundle of charms over the stone. Next morning he returns to the spot, and sets fire to the bundle at the moment when the sun rises from the sea. As the smoke curls up, he rubs the stone with a dry coral, invokes his ancestors, and says, son, I do this that you may be burning hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky. The New Caledonians also make a drought by means of a disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the moment when the sun rises, the wizard holds the stone in his hand, and passes a burning brand repeatedly into the hole, while he says, I kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up our land, so that it may produce nothing. The Banks Islanders make sunshine by means of a mock sun. They take a very round stone, called a vatloa or sunstone, wind red braid around it, and stick it with owl's feathers to represent rays, singing the proper spell in a low voice. Then they hang it on some high tree, such as a banyan or a chesuarina, in a sacred place. The offering made by the Brahmin in the morning is supposed to produce the sun. And we are told that, assuredly it would not rise were he not to make that offering. The ancient Mexicans conceived the sun as the source of all vital force, hence they named him Ipálnimo Juani, he by whom men live. But if he bestowed life on the world, he also needed to receive life from it. And as the heart is the seat and symbol of life, bleeding hearts of men and animals were presented to the sun to maintain him in vigor and enable him to run his course across the sky. Thus the Mexican sacrifices to the sun were magical rather than religious, being designed not so much to please and propitiate him as physically to renew his energies of light, heat, and motion. The constant demand for human victims to feed the solar fire was met by waging war every year on the neighboring tribes and bringing back troops of captives to be sacrificed on the altar. Thus the ceaseless wars of the Mexicans and their cruel system of human sacrifices, the most monstrous on record, sprang in great measure from a mistaken theory of the solar system. No more striking illustration could be given of the disastrous consequences that may flow in practice from a purely speculative error. The ancient Greeks believed that the sun drove in a chariot across the sky, hence the Rhodians, who worshipped the sun as their chief deity, annually dedicated a chariot and four horses to him, and flung them into the sea for his use. Doubtless they thought that after a year's work, its old horses and chariot would be worn out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of Judah dedicated chariots and horses to the sun, and the Spartans, Persians, and Masegiti sacrificed horses to him. The Spartans performed the sacrifice on the top of Mount Teigetis, the beautiful range behind which they saw the great luminaries sat every night. It was as natural for the inhabitants of the Valley of Sparta to do this, as it was for the islanders of Rhodes to throw the chariot and horses into the sea, into which the sun seemed to them to sink at evening. For thus, whether on the mountain or in the sea, the fresh horses stood ready for the weary god, where they would be most welcome, at the end of his day's journey. As some people think they can light up the sun, or speed him on his way, so others fancy they can retard or stop him. In a pass of the Peruvian Andes, stand two ruined towers on opposite hills. Iron hooks are clamped into their walls for the purpose of stretching a net from one tower to the other. The net is intended to catch the sun. Stories of men who have caught the sun in the news are widely spread. When the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sinking lower and lower in the Arctic sky, the Eskimos of Iglulik play the game of cat's cradle in order to catch him in the meshes of the string and so prevent his disappearance. On the contrary, when the sun is moving northward in the spring, they play the game of cup and ball to hasten his return. When an Australian black fellow wishes to stay the sun from going down till he gets home, he puts a sod in the fork of a tree, exactly facing the setting sun. On the other hand, to make it go down faster, the Australians throw sand into the air and blow with their mouths towards the sun, perhaps to waft the lingering orb westward and bury it under the sands into which it appears to sink at night. As some people imagine they can hasten the sun, so others fancy they can jog the tardy moon. The natives of New Guinea reckon months by the moon, and some of them have been known to throw stones and spears at the moon in order to accelerate its progress and so to hasten their return of their friends, who were away from home for twelve months working on a tobacco plantation. The Maylays think that a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person into a fever. Hence they attempt to extinguish the glow by spitting out water and throwing ashes at it. The shoe-swap Indians believe that they can bring on cold weather by burning the wood of a tree that has been struck by lightning. The belief may be based on the observation that, in their country, cold follows a thunderstorm. Hence in spring, when these Indians are travelling over the snow on high ground, they burn splinters of such wood in the fire in order that the crest of the snow may not melt. Section 4. The Magical Control of the Wind Once more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow or to be still. When the day is hot and a yakut has a long way to go, he takes a stone which he has chance to find in an animal or fish, winds a horse-hair several times around it, and ties it to a stick. He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze begins to blow. In order to procure a cool wind for nine days, the stone should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast, and then presented to the sun, while the sorcerer makes three turns contrary to the course of the luminary. If a hotentot desires the wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on the end of a pole, in the belief that by blowing the skin down, the wind will lose all its force and must itself fall. Phuegian wizards throw shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of the island of Bibeli, off New Guinea, are reported to make wind by blowing with their mouths. In stormy weather, the Bogajum people say, the Bibeli folk are at it again, blowing away. Another way of making wind, which is practiced in New Guinea, is to strike a wind-stone lightly with the stick. To strike it hard would bring on a hurricane. So in Scotland, which is used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it thrice on a stone, saying, I knock this rag upon this stain, to raise the wind in the devil's name, it sound that lie till I please again. In Greenland, a woman in child-bed, and for some time after delivery, is supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She has only to go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and, coming back into the house, blow it out again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth, which enjoyed the reputation of being able to still the raging wind. But we do not know in what manner its members exercised a useful function, which probably earned for them a more solid recompense than mere repute among the seafaring population of the Isthmus. Even in Christian times, under the reign of Constantine, a certain Sopiter suffered death at Constantinople on a charge of binding the winds by magic, because it happened that the corn-ships of Egypt and Syria were detained afar by calms or headwinds to the rage and disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used to sell wind to storm-stayed mariners. The wind was enclosed in three knots. If they undid the first knot, a moderate wind sprang up. If the second, it blew half a gale. If the third, a hurricane. Indeed, the Estonians, whose country is divided from Finland, only by an arm of the sea, still believe in the magical powers of their northern neighbors. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the north and northeast, bringing ague and rheumatic inflammations in their train, are set down by the simple Estonian peasantry to the machinations of the Finnish wizards and witches. In particular, they regard with special dread, three days in spring to which they give the name of the Days of Cross. One of them falls on the eve of Ascension Day. The people in the neighborhood of Felon fear to go out on these days lest the cruel winds from Lapland shits might them dead. A popular Estonian song runs, Winds of Cross, rushing and mighty, heavy the blow of thy wings sweeping past, wild wailing wind of misfortune and sorrow, wizards of Finland, ride by on the blast. It is said, too, that sailors, beating up against the wind in the gulf of Finland, sometimes see a strange sail heave inside to stern, and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with the cloud of canvas, all her studying sails out, right in the teeth of the wind, forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing back the spray and sheets from her cut-water. Every sail swollen to bursting, every rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know that she hails from Finland. The art of tying up the wind in three knots, so that the more knots are loose the stronger will blow the wind, has been attributed to wizards in Lapland and to witches in Shetland, Lewis and the Isle of Man. Shetland seamen still buy winds, in the shape of knotted handkerchiefs or threads from old women who claim to rule the storms. There is said to be ancient crones in Lerwick now, who live by selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathered bag from Eolus, king of the winds. The Motu Motu in New Guinea think that storms are sent by an Obayu sorcerer. For each wind he has a bamboo which he opens at pleasure. On the top of Mount Agu in Togo, a district of West Africa, resides a fetish called Bagba, who is supposed to control the wind and the rain. His priest is said to keep the wind shut up in great pots. Often the stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be intimidated, driven away or killed. When storms and bad weather have lasted long, and food is scarce with the central Eskimo, they endeavor to conjure the tempest by making a long whip of seaweed, armed with which they go down to the beach and strike out in the direction of the wind, crying, Taba, it is enough. Once, when northwesterly winds had kept the ice long on the coast, and food was becoming scarce, the Eskimo performed a ceremony to make it calm. A fire was kindled on the shore, and the men gathered round it enchanted. An old man then stepped up to the fire, and in a coaxing voice invited the demon of the wind to come under the fire and warm himself. When he was supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to which each man present had contributed, was thrown on the flames by an old man, and immediately a flight of arrows sped towards the spot where the fire had been. They thought that the demon would not stay where he had been so badly treated. To complete the effect, guns were discharged in various directions, and the captain of a European vessel was invited to fire on the wind with cannon. On the 21st of February, 1883, a similar ceremony was performed by the Eskimo Point Barrow, Alaska, with the intention of killing the spirit of the wind. Women drove the demon from their houses with clubs and knives, with which they made passes in the air, and the men, gathering round a fire, shot him with their rifles, and crushed him under a heavy stone, the moment that steam rose in a cloud from the smouldering embers, on which a tub of water had just been thrown. The Langua Indians of the Grand Chaco ascribed the rush of a whirlwind to the passage of a spirit, and they fling sticks at it to frighten it away. When the wind blows down their huts, the payaguas of South America snatch up firebrands and run against the wind, menacing it with the blazing brands, while others beat the air with their fists to frighten the storm. When the Guaikourous are threatened by a severe storm, the men go out armed, and the women and children screen their loudest to intimidate the demon. During a tempest, the inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have been seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and lance. The Raja placed himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to be specially active in the defense of her house, slashing the air right and left with a long sabre. In a violent thunderstorm, the peals sounding very near, the kions of Borneo have been seen to draw their swords threateningly half out of their scabbards as if to frighten away the demons of the storm. In Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young black ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with boomerangs. He was away two or three hours and came back very weary, saying he had killed Kuchi, the demon, but that Kuchi had growled at him and he must die. Of the Bedouins of Eastern Africa it is said, no whirlwind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creases who stab into the center of the dusty column in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast. In the light of these examples a story told by Herodotus, which his modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly credible. He says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale, that once in the land of Sile, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing from the Sahara had dried up all the water tanks, so the people took counsel and marched into the body to make war on the south wind. But when they entered the desert the Samoons swept down on them and buried them to a man. The story may well have been told by one who watched them disappearing in battle array with drums and cymbals beating into the red cloud of whirling sand. End of Chapter Five, Sections Three and Four.