 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. Preface The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Arichia. When I first set myself to solve the problem more than 30 years ago, I thought that the solution could be propounded very briefly, but I soon found that to render it probable or even intelligible, it was necessary to discuss certain more general questions, some of which had hardly been broached before. In successive editions the discussion of these and kindred topics has occupied more and more space. The inquiry has branched out in more and more directions until the two volumes of the original work have expanded into twelve. Meantime a wish has often been expressed that the book should be issued in a more compendious form. This abridgment is an attempt to meet the wish, and thereby to bring the work within the range of a wider circle of readers. While the bulk of the book has been greatly reduced, I have endeavoured to retain its leading principles, together with an amount of evidence sufficient to illustrate them clearly. The language of the original has also for the most part been preserved, though here and there the exposition has been somewhat condensed. In order to keep as much of the text as possible I have sacrificed all the notes, and with them all exact references to my authorities. Readers who desire to ascertain the source of any particular statement must therefore consult the larger work, which is fully documented and provided with a complete bibliography. In the abridgment I have neither added new matter nor altered the views expressed in the last edition, for the evidence which has come to my knowledge in the meantime has on the whole served either to confirm my former conclusions, or to furnish fresh illustrations of old principles. Thus, for example, on the crucial question of the practice of putting kings to death, either at the end of a fixed period, or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the body of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of such a custom has been considerably augmented in the interval. A striking instance of a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the powerful medieval kingdom of the Khazars in southern Russia, where the kings were liable to be put to death either on the expiry of a set term, or whenever some public calamity such as drought, dearth, or defeat in war seem to indicate a failure of their natural powers. The evidence for the systematic killing of the Khazar kings, drawn from the accounts of old Arab travellers, has been collected by me elsewhere. Africa, again, has supplied several fresh examples of a similar practice of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps is the custom formally observed in Buñero of choosing every year from a particular clan a mock king who was supposed to incarnate the late king, cohabited with his widows at his temple tomb, and after reigning for a week was strangled. The custom presents a close parallel to the ancient Babylonian festival of the Sakia at which a mock king was dressed in the royal robes, allowed to enjoy the real king's concubines, and after reigning for five days was stripped, scourged, and put to death. That festival in its turn has lately received fresh light from certain Assyrian inscriptions, which seem to confirm the interpretation which I formally gave of the festival as a new year celebration, and the parent of the Jewish festival of Purim. Other recently discovered parallels to the priestly kings of Arikia are African priests and kings who used to be put to death at the end of seven or of two years after being liable in the interval to be attacked and killed by a strong man, who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or the kingdom. With these and other instances of light customs before us, it is no longer possible to regard the rule of succession to the priesthood of Diana at Arikia as exceptional. It clearly exemplifies a widespread institution of which the most numerous and the most similar cases have thus far been found in Africa. How far the facts point to an early influence of Africa on Italy, or even to the existence of an African population in southern Europe, I do not presume to say. The prehistoric relations between the two continents are still obscure and still under investigation. Whether the explanation which I have offered of the institution is correct or not must be left to the future to determine. I shall always be ready to abandon it if a better can be suggested. Meantime, in committing the book in its new form to the judgment of the public, I desire to guard against a misapprehension of its scope which appears to be still rife, though I have sought to correct it before now. If in the present work I have to out at some length on the worship of trees, it is not I trust because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology. It is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough, the golden bough, from a tree in the sacred grove. But I am so far from regarding the reverence for trees as of supreme importance for the evolution of religion that I consider it to have been altogether subordinate to other factors, and in particular to the fear of the human dead which on the whole I believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion. I hope that after this explicit disclaimer I shall no longer be taxed with embracing a system of mythology which I look upon not merely as false, but as preposterous and absurd. But I am too familiar with the Hydra of Error to expect that by lopping off one of the monster's heads I can prevent another, or even the same, from sprouting again. I can only trust to the candour and intelligence of my readers to rectify this serious misconception of my views by a comparison with my own express declaration. J. G. Fraser, One Brick Court Temple, London, June 1922. Chapter One, The King of the Wood One, Diana and Virbius Who does not know Turner's picture of the golden bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dreamlike vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, Diana's mirror as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban Hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace, whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt those woodlands wild. In antiquity this silvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known as the lake and grove of Arichia, but the town of Arichia, the modern Laricia, was situated about three miles off at the foot of the Alban Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree, round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him, as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer, and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or craftier. The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king, but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier or was visited by more evil dreams than his. For year in, year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in fowl, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence put him in jeopardy. Gray hairs might seal his death warrant. To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather, we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick and the wind seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a somber picture set to melancholy music, the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves underfoot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs. The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical antiquity and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation, we must go further afield. No one will probably deny that such a custom savers of a barbarous age and surviving into imperial times stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primeval rock rising from a smooth shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity with which under many superficial differences the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere, if we can detect the motives which led to its institution, if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike, if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity, then we may fairly infer that at a remote age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an inference, in default of direct evidence as to how the priesthood did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration, but it will be more or less probable, according to the degree of completeness with which it fulfills the conditions I have indicated. The object of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come down to us on the subject. According to one story, the worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Restes, who, after killing Thoas, king of the Tauric Cursonese, the Crimea, fled with his sister to Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were transported from Arichia to Rome, and buried in front of the Temple of Saturn on the capitaline slope, beside the Temple of Concord. The bloody ritual, which legend described to the Tauric Diana, is familiar to classical readers. It is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was sacrificed on her altar, but transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree, of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its bowels. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood, Rex Nemorensis. According to the public opinion of the ancients, the fateful branch was that golden bow which, at the Sibyl's bidding, Ineos plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead. The flight of the slave represented it was said, the flight of Orestes. His combat with the priest was a reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times. For amongst his other freaks, Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart Ruffian to slay him, and the Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the Age of the Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still the prize of victory in a single combat. Of the worship of Diana at Nemi, some leading features can still be made out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the site, it appears that she was conceived of, especially as a huntress, and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting expectant mothers an easy delivery. Again fire seems to have played a foremost part in her ritual. Four during her annual festival held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake, and throughout the length and breadth of Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth. Bronze statuettes found in her precinct represent the goddess herself holding a torch in her raised right hand, and women whose prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing lighted torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows. Someone unknown dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a little shrine at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius and his family. The terracotta lamps which have been discovered in the grove may perhaps have served a like purpose for humbler persons. If so, the analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy candles in churches would be obvious. Further, the title of Vesta, born by Diana at Nemi, points clearly to the maintenance of a perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large circular basement at the northeast corner of the temple, raised on three steps and bearing traces of a mosaic pavement, probably supported a round temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like the round temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire would seem to have been tended by Vestal virgins, for the head of a Vestal in terracotta was found on the spot, and the worship of a perpetual fire cared for by holy maidens appears to have been common in Laitium from the earliest to the latest times. Further, at the annual festival of the goddess, hunting dogs were crowned and wild beasts were not molested. Young people went through a purificatory ceremony in her honour. Wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a kid. Cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the boughs. But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi. Two lesser divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph of the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Lemole, because here were established the mills of the modern village of Nemi. The purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is mentioned by Ovid, who tells us that he had often drunk of its waters. Women with child used to sacrifice to Egeria because she was believed, like Diana, to be able to grant them an easy delivery. Tradition ran that the nymph had been the wife or mistress of the wise king Numa, that he had consorted with her in the secrecy of the sacred grove, and that the laws which he gave the Romans had been inspired by communion with her divinity. Plutarch compares the legend with other tales of the loves of goddesses for mortal men, such as the love of Kibela and the moon for the fair youths, Attis and Endymion. According to some, the tristing place of the lovers was not in the woods of Nemi, but in a grove outside the dripping Porta Capena at Rome, where another sacred spring of Egeria gushed from a dark cavern. Every day the Roman vestals fetched water from this spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware pitches on their heads. In juvenile's time the natural rock had been encased in marble, and the hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of poor Jews who were suffered to squat like gypsies in the grove. We may suppose that the spring which fell into the lake of Nemi was the true original Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved down from the Alban hills to the banks of the Tiber, they brought the nymph with them, and found a new home for her in a grove outside the gates. The remains of baths which have been discovered within the sacred precinct, together with many terracotta models of various parts of the human body, suggest that the waters of Egeria were used to heal the sick, who may have signified their hopes or testified their gratitude by dedicating likenesses of the diseased members to the goddess, in accordance with the custom which is still observed in many parts of Europe. To this day it would seem that the spring retains medicinal virtues. The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had it that Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and fair, who learnt the art of venery from the centre, Chiron, and spent all his days in the greenwood, chasing wild beasts, with the virgin huntress Artemis, the Greek counterpart of Diana, for his only comrade. Proud of her divine society, he spurned the love of women, and this proved his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn, inspired his stepmother Phaedra with the love of him, and when he disdained her wicked advances, she falsely accused him to his father, Theseus. The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So, while Hippolytus drove in a chariot by the shore of the Sauronic Gulf, the sea-god sent a fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted, threw Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their hooves to death. But Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, persuaded the leech, Ischelapius, to bring her fair young hunter back to life by his symbols. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return from the gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech himself to Hades. But Diana hid her favourite from the angry god in a thick cloud, disguised his features by adding years to his life, and then bore him far away to the Dells of Nemi, where she entrusted him to the nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary, under the name of Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he reigned a king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana. He had a comely son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father's fate, drove a team of fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against Deneus and the Trojans. Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at Nemi, but elsewhere, for in Campania we hear of a special priest devoted to his service. Horses were excluded from the Erychian grove and sanctuary because horses had killed Hippolytus. It was unlawful to touch his image. Some thought that he was the son. But the truth is, says Servius, that he is a deity associated with Diana, as Attis is associated with the mother of the gods, and Erykthonius with Minerva, and Adonis with Venus. What the nature of that association was, we shall inquire presently. Here it is worth observing that in his long and checkered career this mythical personage has displayed a remarkable tenacity of life, for we can hardly doubt that the saint Hippolytus of the Roman calendar, who was dragged by horses to death on the 13th of August, Diana's own day, is no other than the Greek hero of the same name, who after dying twice over as a heathen sinner, has been happily resuscitated as a Christian saint. It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories told to account for Diana's worship at Nemi are unhistorical. Clearly they belong to that large class of myths, which are made up to explain the origin of a religious ritual, and have no other foundation than the resemblance real or imaginary, which may be traced between it and some foreign ritual. The incongruity of these Nemi myths is indeed transparent, since the foundation of the worship is traced now to Arestes and now to Hippolytus, according as this or that feature of the ritual has to be accounted for. The real value of such tales is that they serve to illustrate the nature of the worship by providing a standard with which to compare it, and further that they bear witness indirectly to its venerable age by showing that the true origin was lost in the mists of a fabulous antiquity. In the latter respect these Nemi legends are probably more to be trusted than the apparently historical tradition, vouched for by Cato the Elder, that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana by a certain Egerius Bibius, or Livius of Tusculum, a Latin dictator, on behalf of the peoples of Tusculum, Arichia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibor, Pometia, and Ardia. This tradition indeed speaks for the great age of the sanctuary, since it seems to date its foundation sometime before 495 BC, the year in which Pometia was sacked by the Romans and disappears from history. But we cannot suppose that so barbarous a rule as that of the Arichian priesthood was deliberately instituted by a league of civilized communities such as the Latin cities undoubtedly were. It must have been handed down from a time beyond the memory of man, when Italy was still in a far-ruder state than any known to us in the historical period. The credit of the tradition is rather shaken and confirmed by another story which ascribes the foundation of the sanctuary to a certain Manius Egerius, who gave rise to the saying there are many manii at Arichia. This proverb some explain by alleging that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Arichia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogie or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arichian slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Arichia and Egerius Livius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both names to the mythical Egeria excite our suspicion. Yet the tradition recorded by Cato seems too circumstantial, and its sponsor too respectable to allow us to dismiss it as an idle fiction. Rather we may suppose that it refers to some ancient restoration or reconstruction of the sanctuary, which was actually carried out by the Confederate states. At any rate it testifies to a belief that the grove had been from early times a common place of worship for many of the oldest cities of the country, if not for the whole Latin Confederacy. 2. Artemis and Hippolytus I have said that the Arichian legends of Orestes and Hippolytus, though worthless as history, have a certain value insofar as they may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask ourselves, why did the authors of these legends pitch upon Orestes and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the Wood? In regard to Orestes the answer is obvious. He and the image of the Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with human blood, were dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of succession to the Arichian priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the case is not so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason for the exclusion of forces from the Grove, but this by itself seems hardly enough to account for the identification. We must try to probe deeper by examining the worship as well as the legend or myth of Hippolytus. 3. He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troyzene, situated on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay where groves of oranges and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the garden of the Hesperides, now clothed the strip of fertile shore at the foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon's sacred island, its peaks veiled in the somber green of the pines. On this fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a temple with an ancient image. His service was performed by a priest who held office for life. Every year a sacrificial festival was held in his honour, and his untimely fate was yearly mourned with weeping and dullful chants by unwedded maidens. Youths and maidens dedicated locks of their hair in his temple before marriage. His grave existed at Troyzene, though the people would not show it. It has been suggested, with great plausibility, that in the handsome Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut off in his youthful prime and yearly mourned by damsels, we have one of those mortal lovers of a goddess, who appear so often in ancient religion, and of whom Adonis is the most familiar type. The rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for the affection of Hippolytus reproduces, it is said, under different names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Prosopinae for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite. The theory probably does no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis. For Artemis was originally a great goddess of fertility, and on the principles of early religion, she who fertilizes nature must herself be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort. On this view Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis of Troyzene, and the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troyzenean youths and maidens before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with the goddess, and so promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of cattle, and of mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troyzene, there were worshiped two female powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connection with the fertility of the ground is unquestionable. When Epidorus suffered from a dearth, the people in obedience to an oracle carved images of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again. Moreover at Troyzene itself, and apparently within the precinct of Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throne was held in honour of these maidens, as the Troyzeneans called them. And it is easy to show that similar customs have been practiced in many lands for the express purpose of ensuring good crops. In the story of the tragic death of the youthful Hippolytus, we may discern an analogy with similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid with their lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess. These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and the legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty fleeting as the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the relation of the life of man to the life of nature, a sad philosophy which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that philosophy and that practice were, we shall learn later on. 3. Recapitulation We can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who according to Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the mother of the gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in general and of childbirth in particular. As such, she, like her Greek counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius is right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana under the title of kings of the wood, and who came, like him, one after the other to a violent end. It is natural, therefore, to conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same relation in which Virbius stood to her, in short that the mortal king of the wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not only have worshipped it as his goddess, but embraced it as his wife. There is at least nothing absurd in the supposition, since even in the time of Pliny, a noble Roman used thus to treat a beautiful beech tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban Hills. He embraced it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine on its trunk. Apparently he took the tree for the goddess. The custom of physically marrying men and women to trees is still practised in India and other parts of the east. Why should it not have obtained in ancient Latham? Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and immemorial antiquity, that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of the fruits of the earth, that she was believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed, that her holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burnt perpetually in a round temple within the precinct, that associated with her was a water-nymph Egeria, who discharged one of Diana's own functions by suckering women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove. Further, that Diana of the wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to Venus or Attis to Cibbele, and lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack. Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to explain the peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood, but perhaps the survey of a wider field may lead us to think that they contain in germ the solution of the problem. To that wider survey we must now address ourselves. It will be a long and laborious, but may possess something of the interest and charm of a voyage of discovery, in which we shall visit many strange foreign lands with strange foreign peoples, and still stranger customs. The wind is in the shrouds, we shake out our sails to it, and leave the coast of Italy behind us for a time. Chapter 2 Priestly Kings The questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two. First, why had Diana's priest at Nemi, the king of the wood, to slay his predecessor? Second, why before doing so, had he to pluck the branch of a certain tree, which the public opinion of the ancients identified with Virgil's golden bow? The first point on which we fasten is the priest's title. Why was he called the king of the wood? Why was his office spoken of as a kingdom? The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latham there was a priest called the sacrificial king, or king of the sacred rites, and his wife bore the title of queen of the sacred rites. In republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was called the king and his wife the queen. The functions of both were religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings whose duties, so far as they are known, seemed to have been priestly and to have centered around the common half of the state. Some Greek states had several of these titular kings who held office simultaneously. At Rome the tradition was that the sacrificial king had been appointed after the abolition of the monarchy in order to offer the sacrifices which before had been offered by the kings. A similar view as to the origin of the priestly kings appears to have prevailed in Greece. In itself the opinion is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of Sparta, almost the only purely Greek state which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of the god. One of the two Spartan kings held the priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood of heavenly Zeus. This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar to everyone. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred slaves and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority like the popes of medieval Rome. Such priest-ridden cities were zealot and pestinous. Teutonic kings again, in the old heathen days, seemed to have stood in the position and to have exercised the powers of high priests. The emperors of China offered public sacrifices, the details of which were regulated by the ritual books. The king of Madagascar was high priest of the realm. At the great festival of the new year, when a bullock was sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving while his attendants slaughtered the animal. In the monarchical states which still maintain their independence amongst the gallows of eastern Africa, the king sacrifices on the mountaintops and regulates the immolation of human victims and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar union of temporal and spiritual power of royal and priestly duties in the kings of that delightful region of Central America whose ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the tropical forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious ruins of Palenque. When we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also, we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were revered in many cases not merely as priests, that is as intercessors between man and God, but as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects and worshipers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals and are sought if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and sunshine in due season to make the crops grow and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is by personal beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their hopes and their fears. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his powers of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises or threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods, and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher being. He, the savage, possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow men. This is one way in which the idea of a man god is reached, but there is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, savage man has a different and probably still older conception, in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic as it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as well as a priest. Indeed, he appears to have often attained to power by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art. Hence, in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system of superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all countries. Accordingly, I propose to consider the subject in some detail. End of Chapter 2 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 3 Sympathetic Magic Part 1 The Principles of Magic If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two. First, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause. And second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the law of similarity, the latter the law of contact or contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the law of similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it. From the second, he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not. Charms based on the law of similarity may be called homeopathic or imitative magic. Charms based on the law of contact or contagion may be called contagious magic. To denote the first of these branches of magic, the term homeopathic is perhaps preferable, for the alternative term, imitative or mimetic, suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious agent who imitates, thereby limiting the scope of magic too narrowly. For the same principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations of inanimate nature. In other words, he tacitly assumes that the laws of similarity and contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct. It is a false science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural law, that is, as a statement of the rules which determine the sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called theoretical magic. Regarded as a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to compass their ends, it may be called practical magic. At the same time, it is to be borne in mind that the primitive magician knows magic only on its practical side. He never analyses the mental processes on which his practice is based, never reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With him, as with the vast majority of men, logic is implicit, not explicit. He reasons just as he digests his food in complete ignorance of the intellectual and physiological processes which are essential to the one operation and to the other. In short, to him magic is always an art, never a science. The very idea of science is lacking in his undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magician's practice, to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed, to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications, in short, to discern the spurious science behind the bastard art. If my analysis of the magician's logic is correct, its two great principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of the association of ideas. Homeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity. Contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity. Homeopathic magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are the same. Contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact. But in practice, the two branches are often combined, or to be more exact. While homeopathic or imitative magic may be practiced by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the homeopathic or imitative principle. Thus generally stated, the two things may be a little difficult to grasp, but they will readily become intelligible when they are illustrated by particular examples. Both trains of thought are in fact extremely simple and elementary. It could hardly be otherwise, since they are familiar in the concrete, though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere. Both branches of magic, the homeopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be comprehended under the general name of sympathetic magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty. It may be convenient to tabulate as follows the branches of magic according to the laws of thought which underlie them. Under the heading of sympathetic magic, or the law of sympathy, there is a left branch, homeopathic magic, or the law of similarity, and a right branch, contagious magic, or the law of contact. I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic magic by examples beginning with homeopathic magic. Part 2 First Part Homeopathic or imitative magic Perhaps the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that just as the image suffers so does the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few instances out of many may be given to prove at once the wide diffusion of the practice over the world, and its remarkable persistence through the ages. For thousands of years ago it was known to the sorcerers of ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome, and at this day it is still resulted to by cunning and malignant savages in Australia, Africa, and Scotland. Thus the North American Indians, we are told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented. For example, when an Ojibwe Indian desires to work evil on anyone, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy, and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle pierces, or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body. But if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet uttering certain magic words as he does so. The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burnt the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass, this they called burning his soul. A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows, take pairings of nails, hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim, enough to represent every part of his person, then make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted beescomb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say, it is not the wax that I am scorching, it is the liver, heart, and spleen of so and so that I scorch. After the seventh time, burn the figure and your victim will die. This charm obviously combines the principles of homeopathic and contagious magic, since the image which is made in the likeness of an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him, namely his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay charm, which resembles the Ojibwe practice, still more closely, is to make a corpse of wax from an empty beescomb, and of the length of a footstep. Then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is blind. Pierce the stomach, and he is sick. Pierce the head, and his head aches. Pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards, and shroud it as you would a corpse, pray over it as if you were praying over the dead, then bury it in the middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that his blood may not be on your head, you should say, it is not I who am burying him, it is Gabriel who is burying him. Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the Archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than you are. If homeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has commonly been practiced for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with a benevolent intention of helping others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth, and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the bat-axe of Sumatra, a barren woman who would become a mother, will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to Upolero, the spirit of the son. A doll is made of red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms as if she would suckle it. Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the woman's head, saying, Oh Upolero, make use of the fowl, let it fall, let descend a child I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and on my lap. Then he asks the woman, Has the child come? and she answers, Yes, it is sucking already. After that the man holds the fowl on the husband's head and mumbles some form of words. Lastly the bird is killed and laid together with some beetle on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here the pretence that a child has been born is a purely magical right designed to secure by means of imitation or mimicry that a child really shall be born, but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the right by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with and reinforced by religion. Among some of the dyacs of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain the same end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He in fact pretends to be the expectant mother. A large stone attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapped around his body represents the child in the womb, and following the directions shouted to him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born. The same principle of make-believe so dear to children has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If you pretend to give birth to a boy or even to a great bearded man who is not a drop of your blood in his veins, then in the eyes of primitive law and philosophy that boy or man is really your son to all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imitation of a real birth, and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practiced by the barbarians. At the present time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes. Ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son and inherits the whole property of his adoptive parents. Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grown-up man or woman, the great many people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front he is stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the Areca palm and tied to the woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict. An offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against a real child. In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman's lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling clothes and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk. In ancient India under similar circumstances the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water. There he sat with doubled up fists and without uttering a syllable like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were want to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got up out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up. In particular he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity. Another beneficent use of homeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness. The ancient Hindus performed an elaborate ceremony based on homeopathic magic for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was to banish the yellow color to yellow creatures and yellow things such as the sun to which it properly belongs and to procure for the patient a healthy red color from a living vigorous source, namely a red bull. With this intention a priest recited the following spell. Up to the sun shall go thy heartache and thy jaundice. In the color of the red bull do we envelop thee. We envelop thee in red tints unto long life. May this person go unscathed and be free of yellow color. The cows whose divinity is Rohini, they whom moreover are themselves red, Rohini, in their every form and every strength we do envelop thee. Into the parrots, into the thrush do we put thy jaundice, and furthermore unto the yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice. While he uttered these words the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of health into the sallow patient, gave him water to sip, which was mixed with the hair of a red bull. He poured water over the animal's back and made the sick man drink it. He seated him on the skin of a red bull and tied a piece of the skin to him. Then, in order to improve his color by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of turmeric or kurkuma, a yellow plant, set him on a bed, tied three yellow birds to wit a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means of a yellow string to the foot of the bed. Then pouring water over the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with it no doubt the jaundice from him to the birds. After that, by way of giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapped them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient's skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. Such is the nature, says Plutarch, and such the temperament of the creature, that it draws out and receives the malady which issues like a stream through the eyesight. So well recognised among bird fanciers was this valuable property of the stone curlew, that when they had one of these birds for sale, they kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay not in its colour, but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same bird, to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice. Because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He mentions also a stone, which was supposed to cure jaundice, because its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin. One of the great merits of homeopathic magic is that it enables the cure to be performed on the person of the doctor, instead of on that of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience, while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before him. For example, the presence of peche in France, labour under the impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about by the patient's stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the organ to its proper place. After hearing the symptoms, he at once throws himself into the most horrible contortions for the purpose of unhooking his own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again in another series of contortions and grimaces, while the patient experiences a corresponding relief, fee five francs. In like manner, a dyac medicine man, who has been fetched in a case of illness, will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken out of the house, and deposited on the ground. After about an hour, the other medicine men loose the pretended dead man and bring him to life, and as he recovers, the sick person is supposed to recover too. A cure for a tumour, based on the principle of homeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcelus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius I, in his curious work on medicine. It is as follows. Take a root of vervein, cut it across, and hang one end of it round the patient's neck, and the other in the smoke of the fire. As the vervein dries up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervein into water, for as the root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall from your body. Only you must be very careful not to wipe them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it. Further, homeopathic and, in general, sympathetic magic plays a great part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to secure an abundant supply of food. On the principle that light produces light, many things are done by him and his friends in deliberate imitation of the result which he seeks to attain, and, on the other hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because they bear some more or less fanciful resemblance to others which would really be disastrous. Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically carried into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than in the barren regions of central Australia. Here the tribes are divided into a number of totem clans, each of which is charged with the duty of multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of magic or ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible animals and plants, and the general result supposed to be accomplished by these ceremonies is that of supplying the tribe with food and other necessaries. Often the rites consist of an imitation of the effect which the people desire to produce, in other words, their magic is homeopathic or imitative. Thus among the waramunga, the headman of the white cockatoo totem seeks to multiply white cockatoos by holding an effigy of the bird and mimicking its harsh cry. Among the arunta, the men of the witchety grub totem, perform ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the other members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime representing the fully developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is set up to imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a number of men who have the grub for their totem sit and sing of the creature in its various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as they do so they sing of the insect emerging from the chrysalis. This is supposed to multiply the numbers of the grubs. Again in order to multiply emus which are an important article of food, the men of the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem, especially the parts of the emu which they like best to eat, namely the fat and the eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers wearing headdresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions. The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which are bound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season and the Indians are hungry, a nutka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come will cause them to arrive at once. The islanders of the Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Torajas of central Salibis believe that things of the same sort attract each other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital aether. Hence they hang up the jaw bones of deer and wild pigs in their houses in order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In the island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for it, the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen leaves. In the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall into the pit, just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. In the East Indian islands of Sapa Roea, Aroecoe and Noesa Laut, when a fisherman is about to set a trap for fish in the sea, he looks out for a tree of which the fruit has been much pecked at by birds. From such a tree he cuts a stout branch and makes of it the principal post in his fish trap, for he believes that just as the tree lured many birds to its fruit, so the branch cut from that tree will lure many fish to the trap. The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. The small beetle which haunts coconut trees is placed in the hole of the spear-halfed into which the spearhead fits. This is supposed to make the spearhead stick fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a man's skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set his nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off, then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be caught in it and cries, Hello, what's this? I'm afraid I'm caught. After that the net is sure to catch game. A pantomime of the same sort has been acted within living memory in our Scottish Highlands. The reverent James MacDonald, now of Ray in Cathness, tells us that in his boyhood when he was fishing with companions about Loch Haleen, and they had had no bites for a long time, they used to make a pretence of throwing one of their fellows overboard and hauling him out of the water as if he were a fish. After that the trout or silloch would begin to nibble, according as the boat was on fresh or salt water. Before a carrier Indian goes out to sneer Martins, he sleeps by himself for about ten nights beside the fire with a little stick pressed down on his neck. This naturally causes the fall stick of his trap to drop down on the neck of the Martin. Among the Galela Rese, who inhabit a district in the northern part of Halmahera, a large island to the west of New Guinea, it is a maxim that when you are loading your gun to go out shooting, you should always put the bullet in your mouth before you insert it in the gun, for by so doing you practically eat the game that is to be hit by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly miss the mark. A Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles and is awaiting results, is carefully needing his curry always to begin by swallowing three lumps of rice successively, for this helps the bait to slide more easily down the crocodile's throat. He is equally scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry, for if he did, it seems clear that the sharp pointed stick on which the bait is skewered would similarly work itself loose and the crocodile would get off with the bait. Hence in these circumstances it is prudent for the hunter before he begins his meal to get somebody else to take the bones out of his curry, otherwise he may at any moment have to choose between swallowing a bone and losing the crocodile. This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter abstains from doing, lest on the principle that like produces like, they should spoil his luck, for it is to be observed that the system of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive precepts, it comprises a very large number of negative precepts, that is prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to leave undone. The positive precepts are charms, the negative precepts are taboos, in fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or as all events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special application of sympathetic magic with its two great laws of similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not formulated in so many words, nor even conceived in the abstract by the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He thinks that if he acts in a certain way, certain consequences will inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws, and if the consequences of a particular act appear to him likely to prove disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in that way, lest he should incur them. In other words, he abstains from doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of cause and effect, he falsely believes would injure him. In short, he subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative application of practical magic. Positive magic or sorcery says, do this in order that so and so may happen. Negative magic or taboo says, do not do this lest so and so should happen. The aim of positive magic or sorcery is to produce a desired event. The aim of negative magic or taboo is to avoid an undesirable one. But both consequences, the desirable and the undesirable, are supposed to be brought about in accordance with the laws of similarity and contact, and just as the desired consequence is not really affected by the observance of a magical ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does not really result from the violation of a taboo. If the supposed evil necessarily followed a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be a taboo, but a precept of morality or common sense. It is not a taboo to say, do not put your hands in the fire, it is a rule of common sense, because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary evil. In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo, are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive and taboo the negative, pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in tabular form, if magic be a general heading, then theoretical, or magic as a pseudo-science, forms a left branch, and practical, or magic as a pseudo-art, forms a right branch. Under this right branch appear positive magic, or sorcery, and negative magic, or taboo. I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic, because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wish to show that they fall under the head of sympathetic magic, being only particular applications of that general theory. Thus, amongst the Eskimo, boys are forbidden to play cat's cradle, because if they did so, their fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoon line. Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity, which is the basis of homeopathic magic. As the child's fingers are entangled by the string in playing cat's cradle, so they will be entangled by the harpoon line when he is a man and hunts whales. Again, among the huzzles of the Carpathian mountains, the wife of a hunter may not spin while her husband is hunting, or the game will turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable to hit it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of similarity. So too in most parts of ancient Italy, women were forbidden by law to spin on the high roads as they walked, or even to carry their spindles openly, because any such action was believed to injure the crops. Probably the notion was that the twirling of the spindle would twirl the corn stalks and prevent them from growing straight. So too among the Ainus of Sakhalin, a pregnant woman may not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery, because they think that if she did so the child's guts might be entangled like the thread. For a light reason in Bilaspur, a district of India, when the chief men of a village meet in council, no one present should twirl a spindle, for they think that if such a thing were to happen, the discussion like the spindle would move in a circle and never be wound up. In some of the East Indian Islands, anyone who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in. He may not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in like manner stop in front of the hunter's snares and then turn back, instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason, it is a rule with the toradjas of central Salibis, that no one may stand or loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant woman. For such delay would retard the birth of the child. And in various parts of Sumatra, a woman herself in these circumstances is forbidden to stand at the door or on the top rung of the house ladder, under pain of suffering hard labour for her imprudence in neglecting so elementary a precaution. Malaes engage in the search for camphor, eat their food dry, and take care not to pound their salt fine. The reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor tree. Accordingly it seems plain to the Malae, that if, while seeking for camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor would be found also in fine grains. Whereas by eating his salt coarse, he ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large. camphor hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheaf of the leaf stalk of the Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the whole of the expedition they will never wash the plate for fear that the camphor might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of the tree. Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be to wash out the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are embedded. The chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of Siam, is lac. This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young branches of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand. All who engage in the business of gathering the gum abstain from washing themselves, and especially from cleansing their heads, lest by removing the parasites from their hair they should detach the other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set a trap for eagles, and is watching it, will not eat rose buds on any account, for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near the trap, the rose buds in his own stomach would make the bird itch, with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would merely sit and scratch himself. Following this train of thought the eagle hunter also refrains from using an awl when he is looking after his snares, for surely if he were to scratch with an awl the eagles would scratch him. The same disastrous consequence would follow if his wives and children at home used an awl while he is out after eagles, and accordingly they are forbidden to handle the tool in his absence for fear of putting him in bodily danger. Among the taboos observed by savages none perhaps are more numerous or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods, and of such prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law of similarity, and are accordingly examples of negative magic. Just as the savage eats many plants or animals in order to acquire certain desirable qualities with which he believes them to be endowed, so he avoids eating many other animals and plants, lest he should acquire certain undesirable qualities with which he believes them to be infected. In eating the former he practices positive magic, in abstaining from the latter he practices negative magic. Many examples of such positive magic will meet us later on, here I will give a few instances of such negative magic or taboo. For example in Madagascar soldiers are forbidden to eat a number of foods, lest on the principle of homeopathic magic they should be tainted by certain dangerous or undesirable properties which are supposed to in here in these particular viands. Thus they may not taste hedgehog, as it is feared that this animal from its propensity of coiling up into a ball when alarmed will impart a timid shrinking disposition to those who partake of it. Again no soldier should eat an ox's knee, lest like an ox he should become weak in the knees and unable to march. Further the warrior should be careful to avoid partaking of a cock that has died fighting or anything that has been speared to death, and no male animal may on any account be killed in his house while he is away at the wars. For it seems obvious that if he were to eat a cock that had died fighting he would himself be slain on the field of battle. If he were to partake of an animal that had been speared he would be speared himself. If a male animal were killed in his house during his absence he would himself be killed in like manner and perhaps at the same instant. Further the Malagasy soldier must issue kidneys, because in the Malagasy language the word for kidney is the same as that for shot, so shot he would certainly be if he ate a kidney. The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing examples of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at considerable distances. Thus among the Blackfoot Indians the wives and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an owl during his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and father. And again no male animal may be killed in the house of a Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubt science may entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance magic has none. Faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have no difficulty in convincing a savage. The savage believed in it long ago, and what is more he acted on his belief with a logical consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has not yet, so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the savage is convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons and things afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may do so too. Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones. In particular when a party of men are out hunting or fighting their kinsfolk at home are often expected to do certain things or to abstain from doing certain things for the sake of ensuring the safety and success of the distant hunters or warriors. I will now give some instances of this magical telepathy both in its positive and in its negative aspect. In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase he warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence, for if she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip through them. When a dyac villager has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friends, for if they did so the hunters would all be butter-fingered and the prey would slip through their hands. Elephant hunters in East Africa believe that if their wives prove unfaithful in their absence this gives the elephant power over his pursuer who will accordingly be killed or severely wounded, hence if a hunter hears of his wife's misconduct he abandons the chase and returns home. If a wagogo hunter is unsuccessful or is attacked by a lion he attributes it to his wife's misbehaviour at home and returns to her in great wrath. While he is away hunting she may not let anyone pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits and she must lie on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of Bolivia thought that if her hunter's wife was unfaithful to him in his absence he would be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an accident happened to him it was sure to entail the punishment and often the death of the woman whether she was innocent or guilty. An illusion hunter of sea otters thinks that he cannot kill a single animal if during his absence from home his wife should be unfaithful or his sister unchaste. The Wichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demigod for species of cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant does not grow in their country and has to be fetched every year by men who make a journey of 43 days for the purpose. Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their absent husbands by never walking fast much less running while the men are on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits which in the shape of rain, good crops and so forth are expected to flow from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands. During the whole of the time which elapses till the festival of the cactus is held neither party washes except on certain occasions and then only with water brought from the distant country where the holy plant grows. They also fast much eat no salt and are bound to strict continents. Anyone who breaks this law is punished with illness and moreover jeopardizes the result which all are striving for. Health, luck and life are to be gained by gathering the cactus, the god of the god of fire. But in as much as the pure fire cannot benefit the impure men and women must not only remain chaste for the time being but must also purge themselves from the taint of past sin. Hence four days after the men have started the women gather and confess to grandfather fire with what men they have been in love from childhood till now. They may not omit a single one for if they did so the men would not find a single cactus. So to refresh their memories each one prepares a string with as many knots as she has had lovers. This she brings to the temple and standing before the fire she mentions aloud all the men she has scored on her string name after name. Having ended her confession she throws the string into the fire and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame her sins are forgiven her and she departs in peace. From now on the women are averse even to letting men pass near them. The cactus seekers themselves make in like manner a clean breast of all their frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot on a string and after they have talked to all the five winds they deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader who burns it in the fire. End of chapter 3 part 1 and the first part of chapter 3 part 2