 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. The second part of Chapter 3, Part 2. Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded that were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are searching for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the men would evaporate. Husbands can discover by certain knots in the tree when their wives are unfaithful, and it is said that in former days many women were killed by jealous husbands on no better evidence than that of these knots. Further the wives dare not touch a comb while their husbands are away collecting the camphor, for if they did so the interstices between the fibres of the tree, instead of being filled with the precious crystals, would be empty like the spaces between the teeth of a comb. In the Kay Islands, to the south west of New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to sail for a distant port has been launched, the part of the beach on which it lay is covered as speedily as possible with palm branches and becomes sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the ship comes home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to perish. Moreover, all the time that the voyage lasts, three or four young girls specially chosen for the duty are supposed to remain in sympathetic connection with the mariners and to contribute by their behaviour to the safety and success of the voyage. On no account, except for the most necessary purpose, may they quit the room that has been assigned to them. More than that, so long as the vessel is believed to be at sea, they must remain absolutely motionless, crouched on their mats, with their hands clasped behind their knees. They may not turn their heads to the left or to the right, or make any other movement whatsoever. If they did, it would cause the boat to pitch and toss, and they may not eat any sticky stuff such as rice boiled in coconut milk. For the stickiness of the food would clog the passage of the boat through the water. When the sailors are supposed to have reached their destination, the strictness of these rules is somewhat relaxed, but during the whole time that the voyage lasts, the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have sharp bones or stings such as the stingray, lest their friends at sea should be involved in sharp, stinging trouble. Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connection between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who may at any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus, in some districts of Borneo, when a dyke is out headhunting his wife, or if he is unmarried his sister, must wear a sword day and night in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons, and she may not sleep during the day, nor go to bed before two in the morning, lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy. Among the sea dykes of Banting and Sarawak, the women strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are away fighting. Some of the rules are negative, and some are positive, but all alike are based on the principles of magical homeopathy and telepathy. Amongst them are the following. The women must wake very early in the morning and open the windows as soon as it is light, otherwise their absent husbands will oversleep themselves. The women may not oil their hair, or the men will slip. The women may neither sleep nor doze by day, or the men will be drowsy on the march. The women must cook and scatter popcorn on the veranda every morning, so will the men be agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls, for if anyone were to stumble over them the absent husbands would fall and be at the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in the pot and put aside, so will the men far away always have something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the women sit at the loom till their legs grow cramped, otherwise their husbands will likewise be stiff in their joints and unable to rise up quickly or to run away from the foe. So in order to keep their husbands' joints supple the women often vary their labours at the loom by walking up and down the veranda. Further they may not cover up their faces, or the men would not be able to find their way through the tall grass or jungle. Again the women may not sow with a needle or the men will tread on the sharp spikes set by the enemy in the path. Should a wife prove unfaithful while her husband is away he will lose his life in the enemy's country. Some years ago all these rules and more were observed by the women of Banting while their husbands were fighting for the English against rebels. But alas these tender precautions availed them little, for many a man whose faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home found a soldier's grave. In the island of Tymore, while war is being waged, the high priest never quits the temple. His food is brought to him or cooked inside. Day and night he must keep the fire burning, for if he were to let it die out disaster would befall the warriors, and would continue so long as the hearth was cold. Moreover he must drink only hot water during the time the army is absent, for every draught of cold water would damp the spirits of the people, so that they could not vanquish the enemy. In the Kai Islands, when the warriors have departed, the women return indoors and bring out certain baskets containing fruits and stones. These fruits and stones they anoint and place on a board, murmuring as they do so. O Lord Son, Moon, let the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, betrothed and other relations, just as raindrops rebound from these objects which are smeared with oil. As soon as the first shot is heard the baskets are put aside and the women, seizing their fans, rush out of the houses, then waving their fans in the direction of the enemy, they run through the village while they sing, O Golden Fans, let our bullets hit and those of the enemy miss. In this custom the ceremony of anointing stones in order that the bullets may recoil from the men like raindrops from the stones is a piece of pure homeopathic or imitative magic, but the prayer to the Son that he will be pleased to give effect to the charm is a religious and perhaps later addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a charm to direct the bullets towards or away from their mark according as they are discharged from the guns of friends or foes. An old historian of Madagascar informs us that while the men are at the wars and until they return the women and girls cease not day and night to dance and neither lie down nor take food in their own houses and although they are very voluptuously inclined they would not for anything in the world have an intrigue with another man while their husband is at the war believing firmly that if that happened their husband would be either killed or wounded. They believe that by dancing they impart strength, courage and good fortune to their husbands. Accordingly during such times they give themselves no rest and this custom they observe very religiously. Among the cheese-speaking people of the Gold Coast the wives of men who are away with the army paint themselves white and adorn their persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is expected to take place they run about armed with guns or sticks carved to look like guns and taking green pawpaws, fruits shaped somewhat like a melon, they hack them with knives as if they were chopping off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely an imitative charm to enable the men to do to the enemy as the women do to the pawpaws. In the West African town of Framin while the Ashanti war was raging some years ago Mr Fitzgerald Marriott saw a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short petticoat. At their head was a shriveled old sorceress in a very short white petticoat her black hair arranged in a sort of long projecting horn and her black face, breasts, arms and legs profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffalo or horsetails and as they danced they sang our husbands have gone to Ashanti land may they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth. Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia when the men were on the warpath the women performed dances at frequent intervals. These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition. The dancers flourished their knives through long sharp pointed sticks forward or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a lifesaving apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the enemy's country. They painted their faces red and sang as they danced and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands and help them to kill many foes. Some had eagle-downs stuck on the points of their sticks. When the dance was over these weapons were hidden. If a woman whose husband was at the war thought she saw hair or a piece of scalp on the weapon when she took it out she knew that her husband had killed an enemy but if she saw a stain of blood on it she knew he was wounded or dead. When the men of the Yuki tribe in California were away fighting the women at home did not sleep. They danced continually in a circle chanting and waving leafy wands but they said that if they danced all the time their husbands would not grow tired. Among the Haider Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands when the men had gone to war the women at home would get up very early in the morning and pretend to make war by falling upon their children and feigning to take them for slaves. This was supposed to help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a wife were unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the warpath he would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women at home lay with their heads towards the point of the compass to which the war canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about for the warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At Massett the Haider women danced and sang war songs all the time their husbands were away at the wars and they had to keep everything about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might kill her husband by not observing these customs. When a band of Carib Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the warpath their friends left in the village used to calculate as nearly as they could the exact moment when the absent warriors would be advancing to attack the enemy. Then they took two lads laid them down on a bench and inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs. This the youth submitted to without a murmur supported in their sufferings by the firm conviction in which they had been bred from childhood. The non-the constancy and fortitude with which they bore the cruel ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades in the battle. Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has applied the principle of homeopathic or imitative magic is that of causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In Turingen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees and he walks with long strides so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who in sowing let their hair hang loose down their back in order that the rice may grow luxuriously and have long stalks. Similarly in ancient Mexico a festival was held in honor of the goddess of maize or the long-haired mother as she was called. It began at the time when the plant had attained its full growth and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this festival the women wore their long hair unbound shaking and tossing it in the dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial in order that the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion that the grain might be correspondingly large and flat and that the people might have abundance. In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in the air are approved homeopathic modes of making the crops grow high thus in Franche Comté they say that you should dance at the carnival in order to make the hemp grow tall. The notion that a person can influence a plant homeopathically by his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Malay woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked in reaping the rice she explained that she did it to make the rice husks thinner as she was tired of pounding thick husked rice. Clearly she thought that the less clothing she wore the less husk there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand the bagander believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth doubtless in order that the earth might team and the corn swell in the air. When a Catholic priest demonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in the blazing sun with infants at their breasts the man answered father you don't understand these things and that is why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear children and that we men are not. When the women sow the stalk of the maize bears two or three ears the root of the yucca yields two or three basketfuls and everything multiplies in proportion. Now why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth and know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them sow then we men don't know as much about it as they do. Thus on the theory of homeopathic magic a person can influence vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the bad character of his acts or states for example a fruitful woman makes plants fruitful a barren woman makes them barren hence this belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or rules of avoidance people abstain from doing certain things lest they should homeopathically infect the fruits of the earth with their own undesirable state or condition all such customs of abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or taboo thus for example arguing from what may be called the infectiousness of personal acts or states the Galilei Rese say that you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit tree or the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground and that when you are eating watermelon you ought not to mix the pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have put aside to serve as seed for if you do though the pips you spat out may certainly spring up and blossom yet the blossoms will keep falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth and thus these pips will never bear fruit precisely the same train of thought leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of a fruit tree to fall on the ground the tree that springs from that graft will let its fruit fall untimely when the chams of Cochin china are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no shower should fall they eat their rice dry in order to prevent rain from spoiling the crop in the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation homeopathically he infects trees or plants with qualities or accidents good or bad resembling and derived from his own but on the principle of homeopathic magic the influence is mutual the plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the plant in magic as I believe in physics action and reaction are equal and opposite the Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical botany of the homeopathic salt thus wiry roots of the catgut plant are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in the furrow hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction of the roots to make the hair strong and Cherokee ball players wash themselves with it to toughen their muscles it is a Galilei belief that if you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground you will yourself contract a disposition to stumble and fall and that if you partake of something which has been forgotten such as a sweet potato left in the pot or a banana in the fire you will become forgetful the Galilei are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two bananas growing from a single head she would give birth to twins the Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would become a mother of twins if she ate a double grain of millet in Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm by which a banished prince might be restored to his kingdom he had to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown out of the stump of a tree which had been cut down the recuperative power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated through the fire to the food and so to the prince who ate the food which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew out of the tree the Sundanese think that if a house is built of the wood of thorny trees the life of the people who dwell in that house will likewise be thorny and full of trouble there is a fruitful branch of homeopathic magic which works by means of the dead for just as the dead can neither see nor hear nor speak so you may on homeopathic principles render people blind deaf and dumb by the use of dead men's bones or anything else that is tainted by the infection of death thus amongst the Galilei when a young man goes a wooing at night he takes a little earth from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house just above the place where her parents sleep this he fancies will prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved since the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as the dead burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this species of magic which is very useful to them in the exercise of their profession thus a south slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a dead man's bone over the house saying with pungent sarcasm as this bone may weaken so may these people awaken after that not a soul in the house can keep his or her eyes open similarly in java the burglar takes earth from a grave and sprinkles it around the house which he intends to rob this throws the inmates into a deep sleep with the same intention a hindu will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the house indians of peru scatter the dust of dead men's bones and ruthenian burglars remove the marrow from a human shin bone pour tallow into it and having kindled the tallow march thrice around the house with this candle burning which causes the inmates to sleep at death like sleep or the ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg bone and play upon it where upon all persons within hearing are overcome with drowsiness the indians of mexico employed for this maleficent purpose the left forearm of a woman who had died in giving birth to her first child but the arm had to be stolen with it they beat the ground before they entered the house which they designed to plunder this caused everyone in the house to lose all power of speech and motion they were as dead hearing and seeing everything but perfectly powerless some of them however really slept and even snored in europe similar properties were ascribed to the hand of glory which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been hanged if a candle made of the fact of a malefactor who had also died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the hand of glory as in a candlestick it rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented they could not stir a finger any more than if they were dead sometimes the dead man's hand is itself the candle or rather a bunch of candles all its withered fingers being set on fire but should any member of the household be awake one of the fingers will not kindle such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with milk often it is prescribed that the thief's candle should be made of the finger of a newborn or still better unborn child sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such candle for every person in the house for if he has one candle too little somebody in the house will wake and catch him once these tapers begin to burn there is nothing but milk that will put them out in the 17th century robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs an ancient greek robber or burglar thought he could silence and put to flight the fiercest watchdogs by carrying with him a brand plucked from a funeral pyre again servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the restraints of domestic life will take the copper coins from the eyes of a corpse wash them in wine or water and give the liquid to their husbands to drink after swallowing it the husband will be as blind to his wife's peccadillos as the dead man was on whose eyes the coins were laid further animals are often conceived to possess qualities or properties which might be useful to man and homeopathic or imitative magic seeks to communicate these properties to human beings in various ways thus some betuanas wear a ferret as a charm because being very tenacious of life it will make them difficult to kill others wear a certain insect mutilated but living for a similar purpose yet other betwana warriors wear the hair of a hornless ox among their own hair and the skin of a frog on their mantle because a frog is slippery and the ox having no horns is hard to catch so the man who is provided with these charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the frog again it seems plain that a south african warrior who twists tufts of rats hair among his own curly black locks will have just as many chances of avoiding the enemy's spear as the nimble rat has of avoiding things thrown at it hence in these regions rats hair is in great demand when war is expected one of the ancient books of india prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory the earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a place where a bore has been wallowing since the strength of the bore will be in that earth when you are playing the one string loot and your fingers are stiff the thing to do is to catch some long legged field spiders and roast them and then rub your fingers with the ashes that will make your fingers as lithe and nimble as the spider's legs at least so think the gallelarese to bring back a runaway slave an arab will trace a magic circle on the ground stick a nail in the middle of it and attach a beetle by a thread to the nail taking care that the sex of the beetle is that of the fugitive as the beetle crawls round and round it will coil the thread about the nail thus shortening the tether and drawing nearer to the centre at every circuit so by virtue of homeopathic magic the runaway slave will be drawn back to his master among the western tribes of british new guinea a man who has killed a snake will burn it and smear his legs with the ashes when he goes into the forest for no snake will bite him for some days afterwards if a south slavonian has a mind to pilfer and steal at market he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat and then throw a pinch of its ashes over the person with whom he is higgling after that he can take what he likes from the booth and the owner will not be a bit the wiser having become as blind as the deceased cat with whose ashes he has been sprinkled the thief may even ask boldly did i pay for it and the deluded huckster will reply why certainly equally simple and effectual is the expedient adopted by the natives of central australia who desire to cultivate their beards they prick the chin all over with a pointed bone and then stroke it carefully with a magic stick or stone which represents a kind of rat that has very long whiskers the virtue of these whiskers naturally passes into the representative stick or stone and thence by an easy transition to the chin which consequently is soon adorned with a rich growth of beard the ancient greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping that to smear the eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an eagle would give him the eagle's vision and that a raven's eggs would restore the blackness of the raven to silvery hair only the person who adopted this last mode of concealing the ravages of time had to be most careful to keep his mouth full of oil at the time he applied the eggs to his venerable locks else his teeth as well as his hair would be dyed raven black and no amount of scrubbing and scouring would avail to whiten them again the hair restorer was in fact a shade too powerful and in applying it you might get more than you bargained for the witchhol Indians admire the beautiful markings on the backs of serpents hence when a witchhol woman is about to weave or embroider her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole length of its back then she passes the same hand over her forehead and eyes that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the web as the markings on the back of the serpent on the principle of homeopathic magic inanimate things as well as plants and animals may diffuse blessing or bane around them according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the wizard to tap or damn as the case may be the stream of wheel or woe in samarkand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put glue in the palm of its hand in order that when the child grows up his words may be sweet and precious things may stick to his hands as if they were glued the Greeks thought that a garment made from the fleece of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt the wearer setting up an itch or irritation in his skin they were also of the opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were dropped in wine it would make all who drank of that wine fall out amongst themselves among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman often borrows the robe of a woman who has had many children hoping with the robe to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner the kafas of sofala in east Africa had a great dread of being struck with anything hollow such as a reed or straw and greatly preferred being thrashed with a good thick cudgel or an iron bar even though it hurt very much for they thought that if a man were beaten with anything hollow his inside would waste away till he died in eastern seas there is a large shell which the bogeynees of salibis call the old man kajao on fridays they turn these old men upside down and place them on the thresholds of their houses believing that whoever then steps over the threshold of the house will live to be old at initiation a brahmin boy is made to tread with his right foot on the stone while the words are repeated tread on this stone like a stone be firm and the same ceremony is performed with the same words by a brahmin bride at her marriage in madagascar a mode of counteracting the levity of fortune is to bury a stone at the foot of the heavy house post the common custom of swearing upon a stone may be based partly on a belief that the strength and stability of the stone lend confirmation to an oath thus the old Danish historian saxo grammaticus tells us that the ancients when they were to choose a king were want to stand on stones planted in the ground and to proclaim their votes in order to foreshadow from the steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be lasting but while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside in all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and solidity special magical virtues are attributed to particular stones or kinds of stone in accordance with their individual or specific qualities of shape and color for example the Indians of Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize others for the increase of potatoes and others again for the increase of cattle the stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the likeness of cobs of maize and the stones destined to multiply cattle had the shape of sheep in some parts of melanesia a like belief prevails that certain sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond in their nature to the shape of the stone thus a piece of water worn coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to a breadfruit hence in the banks islands a man who finds such a coral will lay it at the root of one of his breadfruit trees in the expectation that it will make the tree bear well if the result answers his expectation he will then for a proper remuneration take stones of less marked character from other men and let them lie near his in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which resides in it similarly a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring in money and if a man found a large stone with a number of small ones under it like a sour among her litter he was sure that to offer money upon it would bring him pigs in these and similar cases the melanesians ascribe the marvellous power not to the stone itself but to its indwelling spirit and sometimes as we have just seen a man endeavors to propitiate the spirit by laying down offerings on the stone but the conception of spirits that must be propitiated lies outside the sphere of magic and within that of religion where such a conception is found as here in conjunction with purely magical ideas and practices the latter may generally be assumed to be the original stock on which the religious conception has been at some later time engrafted for there are strong grounds for thinking that in the evolution of thought magic has preceded religion but to this point we shall return presently the ancients set great store on the magical qualities of precious stones indeed it has been maintained with great show of reason that such stones were used as amulets long before they were worn as mere ornaments thus the Greeks gave the name of tree agate to a stone which exhibits tree like markings and they thought that if two of these gems were tied to the horns or necks of oxen at the plow the crop would be sure to be plentiful again they recognized a milk stone which produced an abundant supply of milk in women if only they drank it dissolved in honey mead milk stones are used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at the present day in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to ensure an abundant flow of milk again the Greeks believed in a stone which cured snake bites and hence was named the snake stone to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and sprinkle the powder on the wound the wine colored amethyst received its name which means not drunken because it was supposed to keep the wearer of it sober and two brothers who desired to live at unity were advised to carry magnets about with them which by drawing the twain together would clearly prevent them from falling out the ancient books of the Hindus lay down a rule that after sunset on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife till the stars begin to twinkle in the sky when the pole star appears he should point it out to her and addressing the star say firm art thou I see thee the firm one firm be thou with me o thriving one then turning to his wife he should say to me Brihaspati has given thee obtaining offspring through me thy husband live with me a hundred autums the intention of the ceremony is plainly to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star it is a wish expressed in Keatsy's last sonnet bright star would I was steadfast as thou art not in lone splendor hung aloft the night dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow and are wrapped on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our attention to trace a subtle relation a secret harmony between its tides and the life of man of animals and of plants in the flowing tide they see not merely a symbol but a cause of exuberance of prosperity and of life while in the ebbing tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure of weakness and of death the breton peasant fancies that clover sown when the tide is coming in will grow well but that if the plant be sown at low water or when the tide is going out it will never reach maturity and that the cows which feed on it will burst his wife believes that the best butter is made when the tide has just turned and is beginning to flow that milk which foams in the churn will go on foaming till the hour of high water is passed and that water drawn from the well or milk extracted from the cow while the tide is rising will boil up in the pot or saucepan and overflow into the fire according to some of the ancients the skins of seals even after they have been parted from their bodies remained in secret sympathy with the sea and were observed to ruffle when the tide was on the ebb another ancient belief attributed to Aristotle was that no creature can die except at ebb tide the belief if we can trust pliny was confirmed by experience so far as regards human beings on the coast of france filistratus also assures us that at cadiz dying people never yielded up the ghost while the water was high a light fancy still lingers in some parts of europe on the cantabrian coast they think that persons who die of chronic or acute disease expire at the moment when the tide begins to recede in portugal all along the coast of wales and on some parts of the coast of britain a belief is said to prevail that people are born when the tide comes in and die when it goes out dickens attests the existence of the same superstition in england people can't die along the coast said mr pegaty except when the tide's pretty nigh out they can't be born unless it's pretty nigh in not probably born till flood the belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of england from northumberland to kent shakespeare must have been familiar with it for he makes full staff die even just between 12 and 1 in the turning o the tide we meet the belief again on the pacific coast of north america among the hiders whenever a good hider is about to die he sees a canoe manned by some of his dead friends who come with the tide to bid him welcome to the spirit land come with us now they say for the tide is about to ebb and we must depart at port stevens in new south wales the natives always buried their dead at flood tide never at ebb lest the retiring water should bear the soul of the departed to some distant country to ensure a long life the chinese have recourse to certain complicated charms which concentrate in themselves the magical essence emanating on homeopathic principles from times and seasons from persons and from things the vehicles employed to transmit these happy influences are no other than grave clothes these are provided by many chinese in their lifetime and most people have them cut out and sewn by an unmarried girl or a very young woman wisely calculating that since such a person is likely to live a great many years to come a part of her capacity to live long must surely pass into the clothes and thus stave off for many years the time when they shall be put to their proper use further the garments are made by preference in a year which has an intercalary month for to the chinese mind it seems plain that grave clothes made in a year which is unusually long will possess the capacity of prolonging life in an unusually high degree amongst the clothes there is one robe in particular on which special pains have been lavished to imbue it with this priceless quality it is a long silken gown of the deepest blue color with the word longevity embroidered all over it in threads of gold to present an aged parent with one of these costly and splendid mantles known as longevity garments is esteemed by the chinese an act of filial piety and a delicate mark of attention as the garment purports to prolong the life of its owner he often wears it especially on festive occasions in order to allow the influence of longevity created by the many golden letters with which it is bespangled to work their full effect upon his person on his birthday above all he hardly ever fails to don it for in china common sense bids a man lay in a large stock of vital energy on his birthday to be expended in the form of health and vigor during the rest of the year a tired in the gorgeous pool and absorbing its blessed influence at every poor the happy owner receives complacently the congratulations of friends and relations who warmly express their admiration of these magnificent sermons and of the filial piety which prompted the children to bestow so beautiful and useful a present on the author of their being another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen in the chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply affected by its shape and that they must vary according to the character of the thing which that shape most nearly resembles thus it is related that long ago the town of tsuen chefu the outlines of which are like those of a carp frequently fell a prey to the depredations of the neighboring city of yong chun which is shaped like a fishing net until the inhabitants of the former town conceived the plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst these pagodas which still tower above the city of tsuen chefu have ever since exercised their happiest influence over its destiny by intercepting the imaginary net before it could descend and entangle in its meshes the imaginary carp some 40 years ago the wise men of shanghai were much exercised to discover the cause of a local rebellion on careful inquiry they ascertained that the rebellion was due to the shape of a large new temple which had most unfortunately been built in the shape of a tortoise an animal of the very worst character the difficulty was serious the danger was pressing for to pull down the temple would have been impious and to let it stand as it was would be to court a succession of similar or worse disasters however the genius of the local professors of geomancy rising to the occasion triumphantly surmounted the difficulty and obviated the danger by filling up two wells which represented the eyes of the tortoise that once blinded that disreptutable animal and rendered him incapable of doing further mischief sometimes homeopathic or imitative magic is called into a null and evil omen by accomplishing it in mimicry the effect is to circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for the real one in Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a regular system here every man's fortune is determined by the day or hour of his birth and if that happens to be an unlucky one his fate is sealed unless the mischief can be extracted as the phrase goes by means of a substitute the ways of extracting the mischief are various for example if a man is born on the first day of the second month February his house will be burnt down when he comes of age to take time by the forelock and avoid this catastrophe the friends of the infant will set up a shed in a field or in the cattlefold and burn it if the ceremony is to be really effective the child and his mother should be placed in the shed and only plucked like brands from the burning hut before it is too late again dripping November is the month of tears and he who is born in it is born to sorrow but in order to disperse the clouds that thus gather over his future he has nothing to do but to take the lid off a boiling pot and wave it about the drops that fall from it will accomplish his destiny and so prevent the tears from trickling from his eyes again if fate has decreed that a young girl still unwed should see her children still unborn descend before her with sorrow to the grave she can avert the calamity as follows she kills a grasshopper wraps it in a rag to represent a shroud and mourns over it like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted moreover she takes a dozen or more other grasshoppers and having removed some of their superfluous legs and wings she lays them about their dead and shrouded fellow the bars of the tortured insects and the agitated motions of their mutilated limbs represent the shrieks and contortions of the mourners at a funeral after burying the deceased grasshopper she leaves the rest to continue their mourning till death release them from their pain and having bound up her dishevelled hair she retires from the grave with the step and carriage of a person plunged in grief thenceforth she looks cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her for it cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over once more if fortune has frowned on a man at his birth and penury has marked him for her own he can easily erase the mark in question by purchasing a couple of cheap pearls priced three havens and burying them for who but the rich of this world can thus afford to fling pearls away and of the second part of chapter three part two the golden bow part three being chapter three sections three and four 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 bow by Sir James Fraser chapter three section three contagious magic thus far we have been considering chiefly that branch of sympathetic magic which may be called homeopathic or imitative its leading principle as we have seen is that like produces like or in other words that an effect resembles its cause the other great branch of sympathetic magic which I have called contagious magic proceeds upon the notion that things which have once been conjoined must remain ever afterwards even when quite disheveled from each other in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is done to the one must similarly affect the other thus the logical basis of contagious magic like that of homeopathic magic is a mistaken association of ideas its physical basis if we may speak of such a thing like the physical basis of homeopathic magic is a material medium of some sort which like the aether of modern physics is assumed to unite distant objects and to convey impressions from one to the other the most familiar example of contagious magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any seven portion of his person as his hair or nails so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may work his will at any distance upon the person from whom they were cut this superstition is worldwide instances of it in regard to hair and nails will be noticed later on in this work among the Australian tribes it was a common practice to knock out one or more of a boy's front teeth at those ceremonies of initiation to which every male member had to submit before he could enjoy the rights and privileges of a full grown man the reason of the practice is obscure all that concerns us here is the belief that a sympathetic relation continued to exist between the lad and his teeth after the latter had been extracted from his gums thus among some of the tribes about the river Darling in New South Wales the extracted tooth was placed under the bark of a tree near a river or waterhole if the bark grew over the tooth or if the tooth fell into the water all was well but if it were exposed and the ants ran over it the natives believed that the boy would suffer from a disease of the mouth among the mooring and other tribes of New South Wales the extracted tooth was first taken care of by an old man and then passed from one headman to another until it had gone all around the community when it came back to the lads father and finally to the lad himself but however it was thus conveyed from hand to hand it might on no account be placed in a bag containing magical substances for to do so would they believed put the owner of the tooth in great danger the late dr. Howitt once acted as custodian of the teeth which had been extracted from some novices at a ceremony of initiation and the old men earnestly besought him not to carry them in a bag in which they knew that he had some quartz crystals they declared that if he did so the magic of the crystals would pass into the teeth and so injure the boys nearly a year after dr. Howitt's return from the ceremony he was visited by one of the principal men of the mooring tribe who had travelled some 250 miles from his home to fetch back the teeth this man explained that he had been sent for them because one of the boys had fallen into ill health and it was believed that the teeth had received some injury which had affected him he was assured that the teeth had been kept in a box apart from any substances like quartz crystals which could influence them and he returned home bearing the teeth with him carefully wrapped up and concealed the basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth lest they should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who haunt graves and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working magic on it in Sussex some 50 years ago a maid servant remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of children's cast teeth affirming that should they be found anored by any animal the child's new tooth would be for all the world like the teeth of the animal that had bitten the old one in proof of this she named old master Simmons who had a very large pig's tooth in his upper jaw a personal defect that he had always a bird was caused by his mother who threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hogs trough a similar belief has led to practices intended on the principles of homeopathic magic to replace old teeth by new and better ones thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat in the hope that through the sympathy which continues to subsist between them and their former owner his other teeth may acquire the same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents for example in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you should insert it in a mouse's hole to do so with a child's milk tooth which has fallen out will prevent the child from having toothache or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards over your head saying mouse give me your iron tooth i will give you my bone tooth after that your other teeth will remain good far away from europe at ruratonga in the pacific when a child's tooth was extracted the following prayer used to be recited big rat little rat here is my old tooth pray give me a new one then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house because rats make their nests in the decayed thatch the reason assigned for invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats teeth were the strongest known to the natives other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic union with the body after the physical connection has been severed are the naval string and the afterbirth including the placenta so intimate indeed is the union conceived to be that the fortunes of the individual for good or evil throughout life are often supposed to be bound up with one or other of these portions of his person so that if his naval string or afterbirth is preserved and properly treated he will be prosperous whereas if it be injured or lost he will suffer accordingly thus certain tribes of western australia believe that a man swims well or ill according as his mother at his birth through the naval string into water or not among the natives of the pennifarther river in queensland it is believed that a part of the child's spirit choee stays in the afterbirth hence the grandmother takes the afterbirth away and buries it in the sand she marks the spot by a number of twigs which she sticks in the ground in a circle tying their tops together so that the structure resembles a cone when angia the being who causes conception in women by putting mud babies into their wombs comes along and sees the place he takes out the spirit and carries it away to one of his haunts such as a tree a hole in a rock or a lagoon where it may remain for years but some time or other he will put the spirit again into a baby and it will be born once more into the world in punape one of the caroline islands the naval string is placed in a shell and then disposed of in such a way a she'll best adapt the child for the career which his parents have chosen for him for example if they wish to make him a good climber they will hang the naval string on a tree the cay islanders regard the naval string as the brother or sister of the child according to the sex of the infant they put it in a pot with ashes and set it in the branches of a tree that it may keep a watchful eye on the fortunes of its comrade among the batax of sumatra as among many other peoples of the indian archipelago the placenta passes for the child's younger brother or sister the sex being determined by the sex of the child and it is buried under the house according to the batax it is bound up with the child's welfare and seems in fact to be the seat of the transferable soul of which we shall hear something later on the carobatax even affirm that of a man's two souls it is the true soul that lives with the placenta under the house that is the soul they say which begets children the begander believe that every person is born with a double and this double they identify with the afterbirth which they regard as a second child the mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a plantain tree which then becomes sacred until the fruit is ripened when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the family among the cherries the naval string of a girl is buried under a corn mortar in order that the girl may grow up to be a good baker but the naval string of a boy is hung up on a tree in the woods in order that he may be a hunter the incas of Peru preserved the naval string with the greatest care and gave it to the child to suck whenever it fell ill in ancient mexico they used to give a boy's naval string to soldiers to be buried by them on a field of battle in order that the boy might thus acquire a passion for war but the naval string of a girl was buried beside the domestic hearth because this was believed to inspire her with a love of home and a taste for cooking and baking even in europe many people still believe that a person's destiny is more or less bound up with that of his naval string or afterbirth thus in renish bavaria the naval string is kept for a while wrapped up in a piece of old linen and then cut or pricked to pieces according as the child is a boy or a girl in order that he or she may grow up to be a skillful workman or a good seamstress in berlin the midwife commonly delivers the dried naval string to the father with a strict injunction to preserve it carefully for so long as it is kept the child will live and thrive and be free from sickness in both and perish the people are careful to throw the naval string neither into water nor into fire believing that if that were done the child will be drowned or burnt thus in many parts of the world the naval string or more commonly the afterbirth is regarded as a living being the brother or sister of the infant or as a material object in which the guardian spirit of the child or part of its soul resides further the sympathetic connection supposed to exist between a person and his afterbirth or naval string comes out very clearly in the widespread custom of treating the afterbirth or naval string in ways which are supposed to influence for life the character and career of the person making him if it is a man a nimble climber a strong swimmer a skillful hunter or a brave soldier and making her if it is a woman a cunning seamstress a good baker and so forth thus the beliefs and usages concerned with the afterbirth or placenta and to a less extent with the naval string present a remarkable parallel to the widespread doctrine of the transferable or external soul and the custom founded on it hence it is hardly rash to conjecture that the resemblance is no mere chance coincidence but that in the afterbirth or placenta we have a physical basis not necessarily the only one for the theory and practice of the external soul the consideration of that subject is reserved for a later part of this work a curious application of the doctrine of contagious magic is the relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the agent of the wound so that whatever is subsequently done by or to the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good or evil thus Pliny tells us that if you have wounded a man and are sorry for it you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated in Melanesia if a man's friends get possession of the arrow which wounded him they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves for then the inflammation will be trifling well soon subside meantime the enemy who shot the arrow is hard at work to aggravate the wound by all the means in his power for this purpose he and his friends drink hot burning juices and chew irritating leaves for this will clearly inflame and irritate the wound further they keep the bow near the fire to make the wound which it has inflected hot and for the same reason they put the arrow head if it has been recovered into the fire moreover they are careful to keep the bow string taught and to twang it occasionally for this will cause the wounded man to suffer from tension of the nerves and spasms of tetanus it is constantly received and avouched says bacon that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself in this experiment upon the relation of men of credit though myself as yet I'm not fully inclined to believe it you shall note the points following first the ointment wherewith this is done is made of diverse ingredients whereof the strangest and hardest to come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man unburied and the fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of generation the precious ointment compounded out of these and other ingredients was applied as the philosopher explains not to the wound but to the weapon and that even though the injured man was at a great distance and knew nothing about it the experiment he tells us had been tried of wiping the ointment off the weapon without the knowledge of the person hurt with the result that he was presently in a great rage of pain until the weapon was anointed again moreover it is affirmed that if you cannot get the weapon yet if you put an instrument of iron or wood resembling the weapon into the wound whereby it bleedeth the anointing of that instrument will serve and work the effect remedies of the sort which bacon deemed worthy of his attention are still in vogue in the eastern counties of england thus in Suffolk if a man cuts himself with a bill hook or scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright and oils it to prevent the wound from festering if he runs a thorn or as he calls it a bush into his hand the oils or greases the extracted thorn a man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand having run the thorn into it while he was hedging on being told that the hand was festering he remarked that did not to for I greased the bush well after I pulled it out if a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the nail clean it and grease it every day to prevent the foot from festering similarly Cambridge cheer laborers think that if a horse has run a nail into its foot it is necessary to grease the nail with lard or oil and put it away in some safe place or the horse will not recover a few years ago a veterinary surgeon was sent for to attend a horse which had ripped its side open on the hinge of a farm gatepost on arriving at the farm he found that nothing had been done to the wounded horse but that a man was busy trying to prize the hinge out of the gatepost in order that it might be greased and put away which in the opinion of the Cambridge wise acres would conduce to the recovery of the animal similarly Essex rustics a pine that if a man has been stabbed with a knife it is essential to his recovery that the knife should be greased and laid across the bed on which the sufferer is lying so in Bavaria you are directed to anoint a linen rag with grease and tied on the edge of the axe that cuts you taking care to keep the sharp edge upwards as the grease on the axe dries your wound heals similarly in the hearts mountains they say that if you cut yourself you ought to smear the knife or the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry place in the name of the father of the son and of the holy ghost as the knife dries the wound heals other people however in Germany say that you should stick the knife in some damp place in the ground and that your heart will heal as the knife rusts others again in Bavaria recommend you to smear the axe or whatever it is with blood and put it under the eaves the train of reasoning which thus commends itself to english and german rustics in common with the savages of melanesia and america is carried a stepfather by the aborigines of central australia who conceive that under certain circumstances the near relations of a wounded man must grease themselves restrict their diet and regulate their behavior in other ways in order to ensure his recovery thus when a lad has been circumcised and the wound is not yet healed his mother may not eat a possum or a certain kind of lizard or carpet snake or any kind of fat for otherwise she would retard the healing of the boy's wound every day she greases her digging sticks and never lets them out of her sight at night she sleeps with them close to her head no one is allowed to touch them every day also she rubs her body all over with grease as in some way this is believed to help her son's recovery another refinement of the same principle is due to the ingenuity of the german peasant it is said that when one of his pigs or sheep breaks its leg a farmer of ranish Bavaria or Hessa will bind up the leg of a chair with bandages and splints in due form for some days thereafter no one may sit on that chair move it or knock up against it for to do so would pain the injured pig or sheep and hinder the cure in this last case it is clear that we've passed wholly out of the region of contagious magic and into the region of homeopathic or imitative magic the chair leg which is treated instead of the beast's leg in no sense belongs to the animal and the application of bandages to it is a mere simulation of the treatment which a more rational surgery would bestow on the real patient the sympathetic connections supposed to exist between a man and the weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion that the blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in his body for a light reason the papuans of tumleo an island off new guinea are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with which their wounds have been dressed for they fear that if these rags fell into the hands of an enemy he might injure them magically thereby once when a man with a wound in his mouth which bled constantly came to the missionaries to be treated his faithful wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it into the sea strained and unnatural as this idea may seem to us it is perhaps less so than the belief that magic sympathy is maintained between a person and his clothes so that whatever is done to the clothes will be felt by the man himself even though he may be far away at the time in the watch of alok tribe of victoria a wizard would sometimes get hold of a man's opossum rug and roast it slowly in the fire and as he did so the owner of the rug would fall sick if the wizard consented to undo the charm he would give the rug back to the sick man's friends bidding them put it in water so as to wash the fire out when that happened the sufferer would feel a refreshing coolness and probably recover in tana one of the new hebrides a man who had a grudge at another and desired his death would try to get possession of a cloth which had touched the sweat of his enemy's body if he succeeded he rubbed the cloth carefully over the leaves and twigs of a certain tree rolled and bound cloth twigs and leaves into a long sausage shaped bundle and burnt it slowly in the fire as the bundle was consumed the victim fell ill and when it was reduced to ashes he died in this last form of enchantment however the magical sympathy may be supposed to exist not so much between the man and the cloth as between the man and the sweat which issued from his body but in other cases of the same sort it seems that the garment by itself is enough to give the sorcerer a hold upon his victim the witch in theocritas while she melted an image or lump of wax in order that her faithless lover might melt with love of her did not forget to throw into the fire a shred of his cloak which he had dropped in her house in pressure they say that if you cannot catch a thief the next best thing you can do is to get hold of a garment which he may have shed in his flight for if you beat it soundly the thief will fall sick this belief is firmly rooted in the popular mind some 80 or 90 years ago in the neighborhood of berend a man was detected trying to steal honey and fled leaving his coat behind him when he heard that the enraged owner of the honey was mauling his lost coat he was so alarmed that he took to his bed and died again magic may be wrought on a man sympathetically not only through his clothes and severed parts of himself but also through the impressions left by his body in sand or earth in particular it is a worldwide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure the feet that made them thus the natives of southeastern australia think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz glass bone or charcoal in his footprints rheumatic pains are often attributed by them to this cause seeing a tantongolung man very lame mr. how it asked him what was the matter he said some fellow has put bottle in my foot he was suffering from rheumatism but believed that an enemy had found his foot track and had buried in it a piece of broken bottle the magic influence of which had entered his foot similar practices prevail in various parts of europe thus in mecklenburg it is thought that if you drive a nail into a man's footprint he will fall lame sometimes it is required that the nail should be taken from a coffin a light mode of injuring an enemy is resorted to in some parts of france it is said that there was an old woman who used to frequent stow in suffoc and she was a witch if while she walked anyone went after her and stuck a nail or a knife into her footprint in the dust the dame could not stir a step till it was withdrawn among the south slavs a girl would dig up the earth from the footprints of the man she loves and put it in a flower pot then she plants in the pot a marigold a flower that it thought to be fadeless and as its golden blossom grows and blooms and never fades so shall her sweet heart's love grow and bloom and never never fade thus the love spell acts on the man through the earth he trod on an old danish mode of concluding a treaty was based on the same idea of the sympathetic connection between a man and his footprints the covenanting parties sprinkled each other's footprints with their own blood thus giving a pledge of fidelity in ancient Greece superstitions of the same sort seem to have been current for it was thought that if a horse stepped on the track of a wolf he was seized with numbness and a maxim ascribed to pythagoras forbade people to pierce a man's footprints with a nail or a knife the same superstition is turned to account by hunters in many parts of the world for the purpose of running down the game thus a german huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the fresh spore of the quarry believing that this will hinder the animal from escaping the aborigines of victoria put hot embers in the tracks of the animal they were pursuing hot and hot hunters throw into the air a handful of sand taken from the footprints of the game believing that this will bring the animal down tomson indians used to lay charms on the tracks of wounded deer after that they deemed it superfluous to pursue the animal any farther that day for being thus charmed it could not travel far and would soon die similarly objebway indians placed medicine on the track of the first deer or bear they met with supposing that this would soon bring the animal into sight even if it were two or three days journey off for this charm had power to compress the journey of several days into a few hours airway hunters of west africa stabbed the footprints of game with a sharp pointed stick in order to maim the quarry and allow them to come up with it but though the footprint is the most obvious it is not the only impression made by the body through which magic may be wrought on a man the aborigines of southeast in australia believe that a man may be injured by burying sharp fragments of quartz glass and so forth in the mark made by his reclining body the magical virtue of these sharp things enters his body and causes those acute pains which the ignorant european puts down to rheumatism we can now understand why it was a maxim with the pythagoreans that in rising from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on the bed clothes the rule was simply an old precaution against magic forming part of a whole code of superstitious maxims which antiquity fathered on pythagoras though doubtless they were familiar to the barbarous forefathers of the greeks long before the time of that philosopher part four the magicians progress we have now concluded our examination of the general principles of sympathetic magic the examples by which i have illustrated them have been drawn for the most part from what may be called private magic that is from magical rites and incantations practiced for the benefit or the injury of individuals but in savage society there is commonly to be found in addition what we may call public magic that is sorcery practiced for the benefit of the whole community wherever ceremonies of this sort are observed for the common good it is obvious that the magician ceases to be merely a private practitioner and becomes to some extent a public functionary the development of such a class of functionaries is of great importance for the political as well as the religious evolution of society for when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king the profession accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ableist and most ambitious men of the tribe because it holds out to them a prospect of honor wealth and power such as hardly any other career could offer the acuterminds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstitions for their own advantage not that the sorcerer is always a naive and imposter he's often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him but the more sagacious he is the more likely he is to see through the fallacies which impose on duller wits thus the ableist members of the profession must tend to be more or less conscious deceivers and it is just these men who in virtue of their superior ability will generally come to the top and win for themselves positions of the highest dignity and the most commanding authority the pitfalls which beset them path of the professional sorcerer are many and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely for it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false not one of them can be maintained without deception conscious or unconscious accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate imposter the honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will produce their supposed effect and when they fail not only really as they always do but conspicuously and disastrously as they often do he is taken aback he is not like his navish colleague ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by his disappointed and angry employers the general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character if we could balance the harm they do by their navery against the benefits they confer by their superior sagacity it might well be found that the good greatly outweighed the evil for more mischief has probably been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by intelligent rascals once your shrewd rogue has attained the height of his ambition and has no longer any selfish end to further he may and often does turn his talents his experience his resources to the service of the public many men who have been least scrupulous in the acquisition of power have been most beneficent in the use of it whether the power they aimed at and one was that of wealth political authority or whatnot in the fields of politics the wily intrigue the ruthless victor may end by being a wise and magnanimous ruler blessed in his lifetime lamented as his death admired and applauded by posterity such men to take two of the most conspicuous instances were Julius Caesar and Augustus but once a fool always a fool and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it the heaviest calamity in English history the breach with America might never have occurred if George III had not been an honest dullard thus so far as the public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society it tended to place the control of affairs in the hands of the ablest man it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one it substituted a monarchy for a democracy or rather for an oligarchy of old men for in general the savage community is ruled not by the whole body of adult males but by a council of elders the change by whatever cause is produced and whatever the character of the early rulers was on the whole very beneficial for the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery no human being is so hide bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage in no state of society consequently is progressed so slow and difficult the old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth he is a slave not indeed to a visible master but to the past to the spirits of his dead forefathers who haunt his steps from birth to death and rule him with a rod of iron what they did is the pattern of right the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience the least possible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for the better the ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest who necessarily sets the standard since he cannot rise while the other can fall the surface of such a society presents a uniform dead level so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities the immeasurable real differences of inborn capacity and temper to a full superficial appearance of equality from this low and stagnant condition of affairs which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state the golden age of humanity everything that helps to raise society by opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men's natural abilities deserves to be welcomed by all who have the real good of their fellows at heart once these elevating influences have begun to operate and they cannot be forever suppressed the progress of civilization becomes comparatively rapid the rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect and if as will often happen he is a man of intellect and energy above the common he will readily avail himself of the opportunity even the whims and caprices of a tyrant maybe of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage and as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided councils of the elders and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind it becomes formidable to its neighbors and enters on a career of aggrandizement which at an early stage of history is often highly favorable to social industrial and intellectual progress for extending its sway partly by force of arms partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes the community soon acquires wealth and slaves both of which by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man intellectual progress which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views cannot be dissociated from industrial or economic progress and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire it is no mere accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory and that the great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilization thus healing in peace the wounds they inflicted in war the Babylonians the Greeks the Romans the Arabs are our witnesses in the past we may yet live to see a similar outburst in Japan nor to remount the stream of history to its sources is it an accident that all the first great strides towards civilization have been made under despotic and theocratic governments like those of Egypt Babylon and Peru where the supreme ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double character of a king and a god it is hardly too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and paradoxical as it may sound of liberty for after all there is more liberty in the best sense liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies under the most absolute despotism the most grinding tyranny than under the apparent freedom of savage life where the individual's lot is cast from the cradle to the grave in the iron mold of hereditary custom so far therefore as the public profession of magic has been one of the roads by which the ablest men have passed to supreme power it has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thralldom of tradition and to elevate them into a larger freer life with a broader outlook on the world this is no small service rendered to humanity and when we remember further that in another direction magic has paved the way for science we are forced to admit that if the black art has done much evil it has also been the source of much good that if it is the child of error it has yet been the mother of freedom and truth and of chapter three of the golden bow