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Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917
"Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom"
CHAPTER XIV.
ANIMISM (continued).
PAGE
Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider
Doctrine of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural
Religion Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently modelled
on that of Souls Transition-stage : classes of Souls passing into
good and evil Demons Manes-Worship Doctrine of Embodiment
of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert bodies De-
moniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and Oracle-
inspiration Fetishism Disease-spirits embodied Ghost attached
to remains of Corpse Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in,
attached to, or operating through, an Object Analogues of Fetish-
doctrine in Modern Science Stock-and-Stone-Worship Idolatry
Survival of Animistic Phraseology in modern Language Decline
of Animistic theory of Nature . . . . .108
CHAPTER XIV.
ANIMISM (continued).
Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider Doctrine of
Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural Religion Definition
of Spirits similar to and apparently modelled on that of Souls Transi-
tion stage : classes of Souls passing into good and evil Demons Manes-
Worship Doctrine of Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vege-
table, and inert bodies Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes
of Disease and Oracle-inspiration Fetishism Disease-spirits embodied
Ghost attached to remains of Corpse Fetish produced by a Spirit
embodied in, attached to, or operating through, an Object Analogues
of Fetish-doctrine in Modern Science Stock-and-Stone Worship
Idolatry Survival of Animistic Phraseology in modern Language
Decline of Animistic theory of Nature.
THE general sciiemc of Animism, of which the doctrine of
souls hitherto discussed forms part, thence expands to com-
plete the full general philosophy of Natural Religion among
mankind. Conformably with that early childlike philosophy
in which human life seems the direct key to the understand-
ing of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe
refers its phenomena in general to the wilful action of per-
vading personal spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but
the reasonable inference that effects are due to causes, which
led the rude men of old days to people with such ethereal
phantoms their own homes and haunts, and the vast earth
and sky beyond. Spirits are simply personified causes. As
men's ordinary life and actions were held to be caused by
souls, so the happy or disastrous events which affect man-
kind, as well as the manifold physical operations of the
108
ANIMISM AS PHILOSOPHY 109
outer- world, were accounted for as caused by Soul-like beings,
spirits whose essential similarity of origin is evident through
all their wondrous variety of power and function. Much
that the primitive animistic view thus explains, has been
indeed given over by more advanced education to the
' metaphysical ' and ' positive ' stages of thought. Yet
animism is still plainly to be traced onward from the intel-
lectual state of the lower races, along the course of the
higher culture, whether its doctrines have been continued
and modified into the accepted philosophy of religion, or
whether they have dwindled into mere survivals in popular
superstition. Though all I here undertake is to sketch in
outline such features of this spiritualistic philosophy as I
can see plainly enough to draw at all, scarcely attempting
to clear away the haze that covers great parts of the subject,
yet even so much as I venture on is a hard task, made yet
harder by the responsibility attaching to it. For it appears
that to follow the course of animism on from its more
primitive stages, is to account for much of mediaeval and
modern opinion whose meaning and reason could hardly be
comprehended without the aid of a development-theory of
culture, taking in the various processes of new formation,
abolition, survival, and revival. Thus even the despised
ideas of savage races become a practically important topic
to the modern world, for here, as usual, whatever bears
on the origin of philosophic opinion, bears also on its
validity.
At this point of the investigation, we come fully into sight
of the principle which has been all along implied in the use
of the word Animism, in a sense beyond its narrower mean-
ing of the doctrine of souls. By using it to express the
doctrine of spirits generally, it is practically asserted that
the idea of souls, demons, deities, and any other classes of
spiritual beings, are conceptions of similar nature through-
out, the conceptions of souls being the original ones of the
series. It was best, from this point of view, to begin with
a careful study of souls, which are the spirits proper to men,
110 ANIMISM.
animals, and things, before extending the survey of the
spirit-world to its fullest range. If it be admitted that souls
and other spiritual beings are conceived of as essentially
similar in their nature, it may be reasonably argued that the
class of conceptions based on evidence most direct and
accessible to ancient men, is the earlier and fundamental
class. To grant this, is in effect to agree that the doctrine
of souls, founded on the natural perceptions of primitive
man, gave rise to the doctrine of spirits, which extends
and modifies its general theory for new purposes, but in
developments less authenticated and consistent, more fanci-
ful and far-fetched. It seems as though the conception of
a human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a
type or model on which he framed not only his ideas of
other souls of lower grade, but also his ideas of spiritual
beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the long
grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world,
the Great Spirit.
The doctrines of the lower races fully justify us in classing
their spiritual beings in general as similar in nature to the
souls of men. It will be incidentally shown here, again
and again, that souls have the same qualities attributed to
them as other spirits, are treated in like fashion, and pass
without distinct breaks into every part of the general
spiritual definition. The similar nature of soul and other
spirit is, in fact, one of the commonplaces of animism, from
its rudest to its most cultured stages. It ranges from the
native New Zealanders' and West Indians' conceptions of
the ' atua ' and the ' cemi,' beings which require special
definition to show whether they are human souls or demons
or deities of some other class, 1 and so onward to the decla-
ration of Philo Judaeus, that souls, demons, and angels
differ indeed in name, but are in reality one,* and to the
state of mind of the modern Roman Catholic priest, who is
1 See Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 134 ; J. G. Muller, ' Amerikanische Urre-
ligioncn,' p. 171.
* Philo Jud. de Gigantibus, iv.
SOULS AS DEMONS. Ill
cautioned in the rubric concerning the examination of a
possessed patient, not to believe the demon if he pretends
to be the soul of some saint or deceased person, or a good
angel (neque ei credatur, si daemon simularet se esse ani-
mam alicujus Sancti, vel defuncti, vel Angelum bonum). 1
Nothing can bring more broadly into view the similar
nature of souls and other spiritual beings than the exist-
ence of a full transitional series of ideas. Souls of dead
men are in fact considered as actually forming one of the
most important classes of demons and deities.
It is quite usual for savage tribes to live in terror of the
souls of the dead as harmful spirits. Thus Australians
have been known to consider the ghosts of the unburied
dead as becoming malignant demons. 2 New Zealanders
have supposed the souls of their dead to become so changed
in nature as to be malignant to their nearest and dearest
friends in life; 3 the Caribs said that, of man's various
souls, some go to the seashore and capsize boats, others to
the forest to be evil spirits; 4 among the Sioux Indians
the fear of a ghost's vengeance has been found to act as a
check on murder ; 8 of some tribes in Central Africa it may
be said that their main religious doctrine is the belief in
ghosts, and that the main characteristic of these ghosts is
to do harm to the living. 8 The Patagonians lived in terror
of the souls of their wizards, which become evil demons
after death; 7 Turanian tribes of North Asia fear their
shamans even more when dead than when alive, for they
become a special class of spirits who are the hurtfullest in
all nature, and who among the Mongols plague the living on
1 Rituale Romanum : De Exorcizandis Obsessis a Daemonic.
* Oldfield, ' Abor. of Australia ' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 236. See
Bonwick, ' Tasmanians,' p. 181.
3 Taylor, ' New Zealand," p. 104.
4 Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 429.
6 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part ii. p. 195 ; M. Eastman, ' Dahcotah,'
p. 72.
Burton, ' Central Afr.' vol. ii. p. 344 ; Schlegel, ' Ewe-Sprache,' p. xxv.
7 Falkner, ' Patagonia,' p. 116 ; but cf. Musters, p. 180.
112 ANIMISM.
purpose to make them bring offerings. 1 In China it is held
that the multitudes of wretched destitute spirits in the
world below, such as souls of lepers and beggars, can sorely
annoy the living ; therefore at certain times they are to be
appeased with offerings of food, scant and beggarly ; and a
man who feels unwell, or fears a mishap in business, will
prudently have some mock-clothing and mock-money burnt
for these ' gentlemen of the lower regions.'* Notions of
this sort are widely prevalent in Indo-China and India ;
whole orders of demons there were formerly human souls,
especially of people left unburied or slain by plague or
violence, of bachelors or of women who died in childbirth,
and who henceforth wreak their /engeance on the living.
They may, however, be propitiated by temples and offerings,
and thus have become in fact a regular class of local deities. 3
Among them may be counted the diabolic soul of a certain
wicked British officer, whom native worshippers in the
Tinnevelly district still propitiate by offering at his grave
the brandy and cheroots he loved in life. 4 India even
carried theory into practice by an actual manufacture of
demons, as witness the two following accounts. A certain
brahman, on whose lands a kshatriya raja had built a house,
ripped himself up in revenge, and became a demon of the
kind called brahmadasyu, who has been ever since the
terror of the whole country, and is the most common village
deity in Kharakpur. 6 Toward the close of the last century
there were two brahmans, out of whose house a man had
wrongfully, as they thought, taken forty rupees ; whereupon
one of the brahmans proceeded to cut off his own mother's
1 Castren, ' Finn. Myth,' p. 122.
2 Doolittlc, ' Chinese,' vol. i. p. 206.
3 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asicn,' vol. ii. pp. 129, 416 ; vol. iii. pp. 29, 257, 278 ;
' Psychologic,' pp. 77, 99; Cross, ' Karens,' I.e. p. 316; Elliot in ' Journ.
Kth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 115 ; Buchanan, 'Mysore, &c.,' in Pinkerton, vol. viii.
p. 677.
4 Shortt, 'Tribes of India,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 192; Tinling,
' Tour round India,' p. 19.
6 Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 101.
MANES-WORSHIP. 113
head, with the professed view, entertained by both mother
and son, that her spirit, excited by the beating of a large
drum during forty days, might haunt, torment, and pursue
to death the taker of their money and those concerned with
him. Declaring with her last words that she would blast
the thief, the spiteful hag deliberately gave up her life to
take ghostly vengeance for those forty rupees. 1 By in-
stances like these it appears that we may trace up from the
psychology of the lower races the familiar ancient and
modern European tales of baleful ghost-demons. The old
fear even now continues to vouch for the old belief.
Happily for man's anticipation of death, and for the
treatment of the sick and aged, thoughts of horror and
hatred do not preponderate in ideas of deified ancestors,
who are regarded on the whole as kindly patron spirits, at
least to their own kinsfolk and worshippers. Manes-wor-
ship is one of the great branches of the religion of mankind.
Its principles are not difficult to understand, for they
plainly keep up the social relations of the living world.
The dead ancestor, now passed into a deity, simply goes on
protecting his own family and receiving suit and service
from them as of old ; the dead chief still watches over his
own tribe, still holds his authority by helping friends and
harming enemies, still rewards the right and sharply
punishes the wrong. It will be enough to show by a few
characteristic examples the general position of manes-wor-
ship among mankind, from the lower culture upward. 2 In
the two Americas it appears not unfrequcntly, from the low
savage level of the Brazilian Camacans, to the somewhat
higher stage of northern Indian tribes whom we hear of as
praying to the spirits of their forefathers for good weather
or luck in hunting, and fancying when an Indian falls into
the fire that the ancestral spirits pushed him in to punish
1 Sir J. Shore in ' Asiatic Res.' vol. iv. p. 331.
1 For some collections of details of manes-worship, see Meiners, ' Ges, lichtc
der Religionen,' vol. i. book 3; Bastian, ' Mcnsch,' vol. ii. pp. 402-11;
' Psychologic,' pp. 72-114.
1 14 ANIMISM.
neglect of the customary gifts, while the Natchez of Louis-
iana are said to have even gone so far as to build temples
for dead men. 1 Turning to the dark races of the Pacific,
we find the Tasmanians laying their sick round a corpse
on the funeral pile, that the dead might come in the night
and take out the devils that caused the diseases ; it is as-
serted in a general way of the natives, that they believed
most implicitly in the return of the spirits of their departed
friends or relations to bless or injure them as the case might
be. 2 In Tanna, the gods are spirits of departed ancestors,
aged chiefs becoming deities after death, presiding over the
growth of yams and fruit trees, and receiving from the
islanders prayer and offerings of first fruits. 3 Nor are the
fairer Polynesians behind in this respect. Below the great
mythological gods of Tonga and New Zealand, the souls of
chiefs and warriors form a lower but active and powerful
order of deities, who in the Tongan paradise intercede for
man's benefit with the higher deities, who direct the Maori
war parties on the march, hover over them and give them
courage in the fight, and, watching jealously their own
tribes and families, punish any violation of the sacred laws
of tapu. 4 Thence we trace the doctrine into the Malay
islands, where the souls of deceased ancestors are looked
to for prosperity in life and help in distress. 5 In Mada-
gascar, the worship of the spirits of the dead is remarkably
associated with the Vazimbas, the aborigines of the island,
who are said still to survive as a distinct race in the inte-
rior, and whose peculiar graves testify to their former occu-
pancy of other districts. These graves, small in size, and
distinguished by a cairn and an upright stone slab or altar,
1 J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrel.' pp. 73, 173, 209, 261 ; Schoolcraft, ' Indian
Tribes,' part i. p. 39, part iii. p. 237 ; Waitz, ' Anthropologie,' vol. iii. pp. 191,
204.
2 Backhouse, ' Australia,' p. 105 ; Bonwick, ' Tasmanians,' p. 182.
3 Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 88.
* Mariner, ' Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 104 ; S. S. Fanner, p. 126 ; Shortland,
4 Trads. of N. Z.' p. 81 ; Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 108.
6 J. R. Forster, 'Observations,' p. 604; Mars den, * Sumatra,' p. 258;
' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 234.
MANES-WORSHIP. 115
are places which the Malagasy regard with equal fear and
veneration, and their faces become sad and serious when
they even pass near. To take a stone or pluck a twig from
one of these graves, to stumble against one in the dark,
would be resented by the angry Vazimba inflicting disease,
or coming in the night to carry off the offender to the
region of ghosts. The Malagasy is thus enabled to account
for every otherwise unaccountable ailment by his having
knowingly or unknowingly given offence to some Vazimba.
They are not indeed always malevolent, they may be pla-
cable or implacable, or partake of both characters. Thus
it comes to pass, that at the altar-slab which long ago some
rude native family set up for commemoration or dutiful
offering of food to a dead kinsman, a barbaric supplanting
race now comes to smear the burnt fat of sacrifice, and set
up the heads of poultry and sheep and the horns of bullocks,
that the mysterious tenant may be kind, not cruel, with his
superhuman powers. 1
On the continent of Africa, manes-worship appears with
extremest definiteness and strength. Thus Zulu warriors,
aided by the ' amatongo,' the spirits of their ancestors,
conquer in the battle ; but if the dead turn their backs on
the living, the living fall in the fight, to become ancestral
spirits in their turn. In anger the ' itongo ' seizes a
living man's body and inflicts disease and death ; in bene-
ficence he gives health, and cattle, and corn, and all men
wish. Even the little children and old women, of small
account in life, become at death spirits having much power,
the infants for kindness, the crones for malice. But it is
especially the head of each family who receives the worship
of his kin. Why it is naturally and reasonably so, a Zulu
thus explains. ' Although they worship the many Ama-
tongo of their tribe, making a great fence around them for
their protection ; yet their father is far before all others
when they worship the Amatongo. Their father is a great
1 Ellis, ' Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 123, 423. As to the connexion of the
Vazimbas with the Mazimba of East Africa, see Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 360, 426.
Il6 ANIMISM.
treasure to them even when he is dead. And those of his
children who are already grown up know him thoroughly,
his gentleness, and his bravery.' ' Black people do not
worship all Amatongo indifferently, that is, all the dead of
their tribe. Speaking generally, the head of each house is
worshipped by the children of that house ; for they do not
know the ancients who are dead, nor their laud-giving
names, nor their names. But their father whom they knew
is the head by whom they begin and end in their prayer,
for they know him best, and his love for his children ; they
remember his kindness to them whilst he was living ; they
compare his treatment of them whilst he was living, sup-
port themselves by it, and say, " He will still treat us in the
same way now he is dead. We do not know why he should
regard others besides us ; he will regard us only." >l It will
be seen in another place how the Zulu follows up the doc-
trine of divine ancestors till he reaches a first ancestor of
man and creator of the world, the primaeval Unkulunkulu.
In West Africa, manes-worship displays in contrast its two
special types. On the one hand, we see the North Guinea
negroes transferring the souls of the dead, according to
their lives, to the rank of good and evil spirits, and if evil
worshipping them the more zealously, as fear is to their
minds a stronger impulse than love. On the other hand,
in Southern Guinea, we see the deep respect paid to the
aged during life, passing into worship when death has
raised them to yet higher influence. There the living bring
to the images of the dead food and drink, and even a small
portion of their profits gained in trade ; they look especially
to dead relatives for help in the trials of life, and ' it is no
uncommon thing to see large groups of men and women, in
times of peril or distress, assembled along the brow of some
commanding eminence, or along the skirts of some dense
1 Callaway, ' Religious System of Amazulu,' part ii. ; see also Arbousset
and Daumas, p. 469 ; Casalis, ' Basutos,' pp. 248-54 ; Waitz, ' Anthro-
pologie,' vol. ii. pp. 411, 419 ; Magyar, ' Reisen in Sud-Afrika,' pp. 21, 335
(Congo) ; Cavazzi, ' Congo,' lib. i.
MANES-WORSHIP. 117
forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon
the spirits of their ancestors.' 1
In Asia, manes-worship comes to the surface in all direc-
tions. The rude Veddas of Ceylon believe in the guardian-
ship of the spirits of the dead ; these, they say, are ' ever
watchful, coming to them in sickness, visiting them in
dreams, giving them flesh when hunting;' and in every
calamity and want they call for aid on the ' kindred
spirits,' and especially the shades of departed children,
tfye ' infant spirits.' 8 Among non-Hindu tribes of India,
whose religions more or less represent prae-Brahmanic and
prae-Buddhistic conditions, wide and deep traces appear of
an ancient and surviving cultus of ancestors. 8 Among
Turanian tribes spread over the northern regions of the
Old World, a similar state of things may be instanced from
the Mongols, worshipping as good deities the princely souls
of Genghis Khan's family, at whose head stands the divine
Genghis himself. 4 Nor have nations of the higher Asiatic
culture generally rejected the time-honoured rite. In Japan
the ' Way of the Kami,' better known to foreigners as the
Sin-tu religion, is one of the officially recognized faiths, and
in it there is still kept up in hut and palace the religion of
the rude old mountain-tribes of the land, who worshipped
their divine ancestors, the Kami, and prayed to them for
help and blessing. To the time of these ancient Kami, say the
modern Japanese, the rude stone implements belong which
are found in the ground in Japan as elsewhere : to modern
ethnologists, however, these bear witness not of divine
but savage parentage. 6 In Siam the lower orders scruple to
1 J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' pp. 217, 388-93. See Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 181,
194.
1 Bailey in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. ii. p. 301. Compare Taylor, ' New-
Zealand, ' p. 153.
3 Buchanan, ' Mysore,' in Pinkerton, vol. viii. pp. 674-7. See Macpherson,
' India,' p. 95 (Khonds) ; Hunter, ' Rural Bengal,' p. 183 (Santals).
4 Castre'n, ' Finn, Myth.' p. 122 ; Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 90. See Pal-
grave, ' Arabia,' vol. i. p. 373.
8 Siebold, ' Nippon,' vol. i. p. 3, vol. ii. p. 51 ; Kempfer, 'Japan,' in
Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 672, 680, 723, 755.
Il8 ANIMISM.
worship the great gods, lest through ignorance they should
blunder in the complex ritual ; they prefer to pray to the
' theparak,' a lower class of deities among whom the souls
of great men take their places at death. 1 In China, as
every one knows, ancestor-worship is the dominant religion
of the land, and interesting problems are opened out to the
Western mind by the spectacle of a great people who for
thousands of years have been thus seeking the living among
the dead. Nowhere is the connexion between parental
authority and conservatism more graphically shown. The
worship of ancestors, begun during their life, is not inter-
rupted but intensified when death makes them deities. The
Chinese, prostrate bodily and mentally before the memorial
tablets that contain the souls of his ancestors, little thinks
that he is all the while proving to mankind how vast a
power unlimited filial obedience, prohibiting change from
ancestral institutions, may exert in stopping the advance of
civilization. The thought of the souls of the dead as sharing
the happiness and glory of their descendants is one which
widely pervades the world, but most such ideas would seem
vague and weak to the Chinese, who will try hard for honour
in his competitive examination with the special motive of
glorifying his dead ancestors, and whose titles of rank will
raise his deceased father and grandfather a grade above
himself, as though, with us, Zachary Macaulay and Copley
the painter should now have viscounts' coronets officially
placed on their tombstones. As so often happens, what is
jest to one people is sober sense to another. There are
300 millions of Chinese who would hardly see a joke in
Charles Lamb reviling the stupid age that would not read
him, and declaring that he would write for antiquity. Had
he been a Chinese himself, he might have written his book
in all seriousness for the benefit of his great-great-grand-
father. Among the Chinese, manes-worship is no rite of
mere affection. The living want the help of the ancestral
spirits, who reward virtue and punish vice : ' The exalted
1 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. Hi. p. 250.
MANES- WORSHIP. 119
ancestor will bring thee, O Prince, much good ! ' ' An-
cestors and fathers will abandon you and give you up, and
come not to help, and ye will die.' If no help comes in
time of need, the Chinese will reproach his ancestor, or
even come to doubt his existence. Thus in a Chinese ode
the sufferers in a dreadful drought cry, ' Heu-tsi cannot or
will not help. . . . Our ancestors have surely perished.
. . . Father, mother, ancestors, how could you calmly
bear this ? ' Nor does manes-worship stop short with direct
family ties ; it is naturally developed to produce, by deifica-
tion of the heroic dead, a series of superior gods to whom
worship is given by the public at large. Thus, according to
legend, the War-god or Military Sage was once in human
life a distinguished soldier, the Mechanics' god was a skilful
workman and inventor of tools, the Swine-god was a hog-
breeder who lost his pigs and died of sorrow, and the
Gamblers' god, a desperate gamester who lost his all and
died of want, is represented by a hideous image called a
' devil gambling for cash,' and in this shape receives the
prayers and offerings of confirmed gamblers, his votaries.
The spirits of San-kea Ta-te, and Chang-yuen-sze go to
partake of the offerings set out in their temples, returning
flushed and florid from their meal ; and the spirit of Con-
fucius is present in the temple, where twice a year the
Emperor does sacrifice to him. 1
The Hindu unites in some degree with the Chinese as to
ancestor-worship, and especially as to the necessity of having
a son by blood or adoption, who shall offer the proper sacri-
fices to him after death. ' May there be born in our lineage,'
the manes are supposed to say, ' a man to offer to us, on the
thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and
ghee.' Offerings made to the divine manes, the ' pitaras '
(patres, fathers) as they are called, preceded and followed by
offerings to the greater deities, give to the worshipper merit
1 Plath, ' Religion der alien Chinescn,' part i. p. 65, part ii. p. 89 ; Doo-
little, ' Chinese,' vol. i. pp. vi. viii. ; vol. ii. p. 373 ; ' Journ. Ind. Archip.'
New Ser. vol. ii. p. 363 ; Legge, ' Confucius,' p. 92.
120 ANIMISM.
and happiness. 1 In classic Europe, apotheosis lies part
within the limits of myth, where it was applied to fabled
ancestors, and part within the limits of actual history, as
where Julius and Augustus shared its honours with the vile
Domitian and Commodus. The most special representa-
tives of ancestor- worship in Europe were perhaps the ancient
Romans, whose word ' manes ' has become the recognized
name for ancestral deities in modern civilized language ;
they embodied them as images, set them up as household
patrons, gratified them with offerings and solemn homage,
and counting them as or among the infernal gods, inscribed
on tombs D. M., ' Diis Manibus.' 2 The occurrence of this
D. M. in Christian epitaphs is an often-noticed case of
religious survival.
Although full ancestor-worship is not practised in modern
Christendom, there remains even now within its limits a
well-marked worship of the dead. A crowd of saints, who
were once men and women, now form an order of inferior
deities, active in the affairs of men and receiving from them
reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the defini-
tion of manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging
in principle to the older manes-worship, was adapted to
answer another purpose in the course of religious transition
in Europe. The local gods, the patron gods of particular
ranks and crafts, the gods from whom men sought special
help in special needs, were too near and dear to the inmost
heart of prae-Christian Europe to be done away with without
substitutes. It proved easier to replace them by saints who
could undertake their particular professions, and even
succeed them in their sacred dwellings. The system of
spiritual division of labour was in time worked out with
wonderful minuteness in the vast array of professional saints,
among whom the most familiar to modern English ears
are St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians ; St. Luke, patron
1 Manu, book iii.
2 Details in Pauly, ' Real-Encyclop.' s.v. ' inferi ' ; Smith's ' Die. of Gr.
and Rom. Biog. and Myth.' ; Meiners, Hartung, &c.
MANES- WORSHIP. 121
of painters ; St. Peter, of fishmongers ; St. Valentine, of
lovers ; St. Sebastian, of archers ; St. Crispin, of cobblers ;
St. Hubert, who cures the bite of mad dogs ; St. Vitus,
who delivers madmen and sufferers from the disease which
bears his name ; St. Fiacre, whose name is now less known
by his shrine than by the hackney-coaches called after him
in the seventeenth century. Not to dwell here minutely
on an often-treated topic, it will be enough to touch on two
particular points. First, as to the direct historical suc-
cession of the Christian saint to the heathen deity, the
following are two very perfect illustrations. It is well
known that Romulus, mindful of his own adventurous in-
fancy, became after death a Roman deity propitious to the
health and safety of young children, so that nurses and
mothers would carry sickly infants to present them in his
little round temple at the foot of the Palatine. In after
ages the temple was replaced by the church of St. Theo-
dorus, and there Dr. Conyers Middleton, who drew public
attention to its curious history, used to look in and see ten
or a dozen women, each with a sick child in her lap, sitting
in silent reverence before the altar of the saint. The
ceremony of blessing children, especially after vaccination,
may still be seen there on Thursday mornings. 1 Again,
Sts. Cosmas and Damianus, according to Maury, owe their
recognized office to a similar curious train of events. They
were martyrs who suffered under Diocletian, at^Egaeae in
Cilicia. Now this place was celebrated for the worship
of ^tsculapius, in whose temple incubation, i.e. sleeping
for oracular dreams, was practised. It seems as though the
idea was transferred on the spot to the two local saints, for
we next hear of them as appearing in a dream to the
Emperor Justinian, when he was ill at Byzantium. They
cured him, he built them a temple, their cultus spread far
and wide, and they frequently appeared to the sick to show
them what they should do. Legend settled that Cosmas
and Damianus were physicians while they lived on earth,
1 Middleton, ' Letter from Rome ' ; Murray's 'Handbook of Rome.'
122 ANIMISM.
and at any rate they are patron-saints of the profession of
medicine to this day. 1 Second, as to the actual state of
hagiolatry in modern Europe, it is obvious on a broad view
that it is declining among the educated classes. Yet modern
examples may be brought forward to show ideas as extreme
as those which prevailed more widely a thousand years ago.
In the Church of the Jesuit College at Rome lies buried
St. Aloysius Gonzaga, on whose festival it is customary
especially for the college students to write letters to him,
which are placed on his gaily decorated and illuminated
altar, and afterwards burnt unopened. The miraculous
answering of these letters is vouched for in an English book
of 1870. To the same year belongs an English tract com-
memorating a late miraculous cure. An Italian lady afflicted
with a tumour and incipient cancer of the breast was
exhorted by a Jesuit priest to recommend herself to the
Blessed John Berchmans, a pious Jesuit novice from Bel-
gium, who died in 1621, and was beatified in 1865. Her
adviser procured for her 'three small packets of dust
gathered from the coffin of this saintly innocent, a little
cross made of the boards of the room the blessed youth
occupied, as well as some portion of the wadding in which
his venerable head was wrapped.' During nine days'
devotion the patient accordingly invoked the Blessed John,
swallowed small portions of his dust in water, and at last
pressed the cross to her breast so vehemently that she was
seized with sickness, went to sleep, and awoke without a
symptom of the complaint. And when Dr. Panegrossi the
physician beheld the incredible cure, and heard that the
patient had addressed herself to the Blessed Berchmans, he
bowed his head, saying, ' When such physicians interfere,
we have nothing more to say I' 1 To sum up the whole
1 L. F. Alfred Maury, ' Magic, &c.,' p. 249 ; ' Acta Sanctorum,' 27 Sep. ;
Gregor. Turon. De Gloria Martyr, i. 98.
- * J. R. Beste, ' Nowadays at Home and Abroad,' London, 1870, vol. ii.
p. 44 ; 'A New Miracle at Rome ; being an Account of a Miraculous Cure,
&c., &c.,' London (Washbourne), 1870.
EMBODIMENT OF SOULS. I2J
history of manes-worship, it is plain that in our time the
dead still receive worship from far the larger half of man-
kind, and it may have been much the same ever since the
remote periods of primitive culture in which the religion of
the manes probably took its rise.
It has now been seen that the theory of souls recognizes
them as capable either of independent existence, or of in-
habiting human, animal, or other bodies. On the prin-
ciple here maintained, that the general theory of spirits is
modelled on the theory of souls, we shall be able to account
for several important branches of the lower philosophy of
religion, which without such explanation may appear in
great measure obscure or absurd. Like souls, other spirits
are supposed able either to exist and act flitting free about
the world, or to become incorporate for more or less time in
solid bodies. It will be well at once to get a secure grasp
of this theory of Embodiment, for without it we shall be
stopped every moment by a difficulty in understanding the
nature of spirits, as defined in the lower animism. The
theory of embodiment serves several highly important pur-
poses in savage and barbarian philosophy. On the one
hand it provides an explanation of the phenomena of morbid
exaltation and derangement, especially as connected with
abnormal utterance, and this view is so far extended as to
produce an almost general doctrine of disease. On the
other hand, it enables the savage either to ' lay ' a hurtful
spirit in some foreign body, and so get rid of it, or to carry
about a useful spirit for his service in a material object, to
set it up as a deity for worship in the body of an animal, or
in a block or stone or image or other thing, which contains
the spirit as a vessel contains a fluid : this is the key to
strict fetishism, and in no small measure to idolatry. In
briefly considering these various branches of the Embodi-
ment-theory, there may be conveniently included certain
groups of cases often impossible to distinguish apart. These
cases belong theoretically rather to obsession than posses-
sion, the spirits not actually inhabiting the bodies, but
124 ANIMISM.
hanging or hovering about them and affecting them from
the outside.
As in normal conditions the man's soul, inhabiting his
body, is held to give it life, to think, speak, and act through
it, so an adaptation of the self -same principle explains ab-
normal conditions of body or mind, by considering the new
symptoms as due to the operation of a second soul-like
being, a strange spirit. The possessed man, tossed and
shaken in fever, pained and wrenched as though some live
creature were tearing or twisting him within, pining as
though it were devouring his vitals day by day, rationally
finds a personal spiritual cause for his sufferings. In
hideous dreams he may even sometimes see the very ghost
or nightmare-fiend that plagues him. Especially when the
mysterious unseen power throws him helpless on the ground,
jerks and writhes him in convulsions, makes him leap upon
the bystanders with a giant's strength and a wild beast's
ferocity, impels him, with distorted face and frantic gesture,
and voice not his own nor seemingly even human, to pour
forth wild incoherent raving, or with thought and eloquence
beyond his sober faculties to command, to counsel, to fore-
tell such a one seems to those who watch him, and even to
himself, to have become the mere instrument of a spirit
which has seized him or entered into him, a possessing
demon in whose personality the patient believes so im-
plicitly that he often imagines a personal name for it, which
it can declare when it speaks in its own voice and character
through his organs of speech ; at last, quitting the medium f s
spent and jaded body, the intruding spirit departs as it
came. This is the savage theory of daemoniacal possession
and obsession, which has been for ages, and still remains,
the dominant theory of disease and inspiration among the
lower races. It is obviously based on an animistic inter-
pretation, most genuine and rational in its proper place in
man's intellectual history, of the actual symptoms of the
cases. The general doctrine of disease-spirits and oracle-
spirits appears to have its earliest, broadest, and most con-
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 125
sistent position within the limits of savagery. When we
have gained a clear idea of it in this its original home, we
shall be able to trace it along from grade to grade of civiliza-
tion, breaking away piecemeal under the influence of new
medical theories, yet sometimes expanding in revival, and
at least in lingering survival holding its place into the midst
of our modern life. The possession-theory is not merely
known to us by the statements of those who describe diseases
in accordance with it. Disease being accounted for by attack
of spirits, it naturally follows that to get rid of these spirits
is the proper means of cure. Thus the practices of the
exorcist appear side by side with the doctrine of possession,
from its first appearance in savagery to its survival in
modern civilization ; and nothing could display more vividly
the conception of a disease or a mental affection as caused
by a personal spiritual being than the proceedings of the
exorcist who talks to it, coaxes or threatens it, makes offer-
ings to it, entices or drives it out of the patient's body, and
induces it to take up its abode in some other. That the
two great effects ascribed to such spiritual influence in
obsession and possession, namely, the infliction of ailments
and the inspiration of oracles, are not only mixed up to-
gether but often run into absolute coincidence, accords with
the view that both results are referred to one common cause.
Also that the intruding or invading spirit may be either a
human soul or may belong to some other class in the spiritual
hierarchy, countenances the opinion that the possession-
theory is derived from, and indeed modelled on, the ordi-
nary theory of the soul acting on the body. In illustrating
the doctrine by typical examples from the enormous mass
of available details, it will hardly be possible to discriminate
among the operating spirits, between those which are souls
and those which are demons, nor to draw an exact line
between obsession by a demon outside and possession by a
demon inside, nor between the condition of the demon-
tormented patient and the demon-actuated doctor, seer, or
priest. In a word, the confusion of these conceptions in the
126 ANIMISM.
savage mind only fairly represents their intimate connexion
in the Possession-theory itself.
In the Australian-Tasmanian district, disease and death
are ascribed to more or less defined spiritual influences ;
descriptions of a demon working a sorcerer's wicked will by
coming slyly behind his victim and hitting him with his
club on the back of his neck, and of a dead man's ghost
angered by having his name uttered, and creeping up into
the utterer's body to consume his liver, are indeed pecu-
liarly graphic details of savage animism. 1 The theory of
disease-spirits is well stated in its extreme form among the
Mintira, a low race of the Malay peninsula. Their ' hantu '
or spirits have among their functions that of causing ail-
ments ; thus the ' hantu kalumbahan ' causes small-pox ;
the ' hantu kamang ' brings on inflammation and swellings
in the hands and feet ; when a person is wounded, the
' hantu pari ' fastens on the wound and sucks, and this is
the cause of the blood flowing. And thus, as the describer
says, ' To enumerate the remainder of the hantus would be
merely to convert the name of every species of disease
known to the Mintira into a proper one. If any new
disease appeared, it would be ascribed to a hantu bearing
the same name.' 8 It will help us to an idea of the distinct
personality which the disease-demon has in the minds of
the lower races, to notice the Orang Laut of this district
placing thorns and brush in the paths leading to a part
where small-pox had broken out, to keep the demons off ;
just as the Khonds of Orissa try with thorns, and ditches,
and stinking oil poured on the ground, to barricade the paths
to their hamlets against the goddess of small-pox, Jugah
Pennu. 8 Among the Dayaks of Borneo, ' to have been
smitten by a spirit ' is to be ill ; sickness may be caused
1 Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 235 ; see Grey, ' Australia/ vol. ii.
p. 337. Bonwick, ' Tasmanians,' pp. 183, 195.
* ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 307.
8 Bastian, 'Psychologic,' p. 204; ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 73, see p. 125
(Battas); Macpherson, 'India,' p. 370. See also Mason, 'Karens,' I. c.
p. 201.
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 127
by invisible spirits inflicting invisible wounds with invisible
spears, or entering men's bodies and driving out their souls,
or lodging in their hearts and making them raving mad.
In the Indian Archipelago, the personal semi-human nature
of the disease-spirits is clearly acknowledged by appeasing
them with feasts and dances and offerings of food set out
for them away in the woods, to induce them to quit their
victims, or by sending tiny proas to sea with offerings, that
spirits which have taken up their abode in sick men's
bowels may embark and not come back. 1 The animistic
theory of disease is strongly marked in Polynesia, where
every sickness is ascribed to spiritual action of deities,
brought on by the offerings of enemies, or by the victim's
violation of the laws of tapu. Thus in New Zealand each
ailment is caused by a spirit, particularly an infant or un-
developed human spirit, which sent into the patient's body
gnaws and. feeds inside ; and the exorcist, finding the path
by which such a disease-spirit came from below to feed on
the vitals of a sick relative, will persuade it by a charm to
get upon a flax-stalk and set off home. We hear, too, of
an idea of the parts of the body forehead, breast, stomach,
feet, &c. being apportioned each to a deity who inflicts
aches and pains and ailments there. 2 So in the Samoan
group, when a man was near death, people were anxious to
part on good terms with him, feeling assured that if he
died with angry feelings towards any one, he would certainly
return and bring calamity on that person or some one closely
allied to him. This was considered a frequent source of
disease and death, the spirit of a departed member of the
family returning and taking up his abode in the head, chest,
or stomach of a living man, and so causing sickness and
death. If a man died suddenly, it was thought that he was
1 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. no, vol. iv. p. 194; St. John, 'Far
East,' vol. i. pp. 71,87; Beeckman in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 133; Meiners,
vol. i. p. 278. See also Doolit tie, ' Chinese,' vol. i. p. 1 59.
* Shortland, ' Trads. of N. Z.' pp. 97, 1 14, 125 ; Taylor, ' New Zealand,'
pp. 48, 137.
128 ANIMISM.
eaten by the spirit that took him ; and though the soul of
one thus devoured would go to the common spirit-land of
the departed, yet it would have no power of speech there,
and if questioned could but beat its breast. It completes
this account to notice that the disease-inflicting souls of the
departed were the same which possessed the living under
more favourable circumstances, coming to talk through a
certain member of the family, prophesying future events,
and giving directions as to family affairs. 1 Farther east, in
the Georgian and Society Islands, evil demons are sent to
scratch and tear people into convulsions and hysterics, to
torment poor wretches as with barbed hooks, or to twist and
knot inside them till they die writhing in agony. But mad-
men are to be treated with great respect, as entered by
a god, and idiots owe the kindness with which they are
appeased and coaxed to the belief in their superhuman
inspiration. 2 Here, and elsewhere in the lower culture,
the old real belief has survived which has passed into a
jest of civilized men in the famous phrase of the ' inspired
idiot.'
American ethnography carries on the record of rude races
ascribing disease to the action of evil spirits. Thus the
Dacotas believe that the spirits punish them for misconduct,
especially for neglecting to make feasts for the dead ; these
spirits have the power to send the spirit of something, as
of a bear, deer, turtle, fish, tree, stone, worm, or deceased
person, which entering the patient causes disease ; the
medicine-man's cure consists in reciting charms over him,
singing ' He-le-li-lah, &c.,' to the accompaniment of a
gourd-rattle with beads inside, ceremonially shooting a
symbolic bark representation of the intruding creature,
sucking over the seat of pain to get the spirit out, and
1 Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 236.
* Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. pp. 363, 395, &c., vol. ii. pp. 193, 274 ;
Cook, '3rd Voy.' vol. iii. p. 131. Details of the superhuman character
ascribed to weak or deranged persons among other races, in Schoolcraft,
part iv. p. 49 ; Martius, vol i. p. 633 ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 323 ; Waitz, vol. ii.
p. 181.
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION.
firing guns at it as it is supposed to be escaping. 1 Such
processes were in full vogue in the West Indies in the time
of Columbus, when Friar Roman Pane put on record his
quaint account of the native sorcerer pulling the disease off
the patient's legs (as one pulls off a pair of trousers), going
out of doors to blow it away, and bidding it begone to the
mountain or the sea ; the performance concluding with the
regular sucking-cure and the pretended extraction of some
stone or bit of flesh, or .such thing, which the patient is
assured that his patron-spirit or deity (cemi) put into him
to cause the disease, in punishment for neglect to build him
a temple or honour him with prayer or offerings of goods.*
Patagonians considered sickness as caused by a spirit enter-
ing the patient's body ; ' they believe every sick person to
be possessed of an evil demon ; hence their physicians
always carry a drum with figures of devils painted on it,
which they strike at the beds of sick persons to drive out
from the body the evil demon which causes the disorder.' 8
In Africa, according to the philosophy of the Basutos and
the Zulus, the causes of disease are the ghosts of the dead,
come to draw the living to themselves, or to compel them
to sacrifice meat-offerings. They are recognized by the
diviners, or by the patient himself, who sees in dreams the
departed spirit come to torment him. Congo tribes in like
manner consider the souls of the dead, passed into the ranks
of powerful spirits, to cause disease and death among man-
kind. Thus, in both these districts, medicine becomes an
almost entirely religious matter of propitiatory sacrifice
and prayer addressed to the disease-inflicting manes. The
1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 250, part ii. pp. 179, 199,
part iii. p. 498 ; M. Eastman, ' Dahcotah,' pp. xxiii. 34, 41, 72. See also
Gregg, ' Commerce of Prairies,' vol. ii. p. 297 (Comanches) ; Morgan,
' Iroquois,' p. 163; Sproat, p. 174 (Ahts) ; Egede, 'Greenland,' p. 186;
Cranz, p. 269.
1 Roman Pane, xix. in ' Life of Colon ' ; in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.
3 D'Orbigny, ' L'Homme Ame'ricain,' vol. ii. pp. 73, 168 ; Musters,
1 Patagonians,' p. 180. Se also J. G. Muller, pp. 207, 231 (Caribs) ; Spix
and Martius, ' Brasilien,' vol. i. p. 70 ; Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 646
(Marcusis).
130 ANIMISM.
Barolong give a kind of worship to deranged persons, as
being under the direct influence of a deity ; while in East
Africa the explanation of madness and idiocy is simple
and typical ' he has fiends.' 1 Negroes of West Africa, on
the supposition that an attack of illness has been caused
by some spiritual being, can ascertain to their satisfaction
what manner of spirit has done it, and why. The patient
may have neglected his ' wong ' or fetish-spirit, who has
therefore made him ill ; or it may be his own ' kla ' or
personal guardian-spirit, who on being summoned explains
that he has not been treated respectfully enough, &c. ; or
it may be a ' sisa ' or ghost of some dead man, who has
taken this means of making known that he wants perhaps
a gold ornament that was left behind when he died.* Of
course, the means of cure will then be to satisfy the demands
of the spirit. Another aspect of the negro doctrine of
disease-spirits is displayed in the following description from
Guinea, by the Rev. J. L. Wilson, the missionary : ' De-
moniacal possessions are common, and the feats performed
by those who are supposed to be under such influence are
certainly not unlike those described in the New Testament.
Frantic gestures, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, feats
of supernatural strength, furious ravings, bodily lacerations,
gnashing of teeth, and other things of a similar character,
may be witnessed in most of the cases which are supposed
to be under diabolical influence.' 3 The remark several
times made by travellers is no doubt true, that the spiritual-
istic theory of disease has tended strongly to prevent
progress in the medical art among the lower races. Thus
among the Bodo and Dhimal of North-East India, who
ascribe all diseases to a deity tormenting the patient for
some impiety or neglect, the exorcists divine the offended
1 Casalis, ' Basutos,' p. 247 ; Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 147, &c. ;
Magyar, ' Sud-Afrika,' p. 21, &c. ; Burton, ' Central Afr.' vol. ii. pp. 320,
354; Steere in ' Journ. Anthrop. Inst.' vol. i. 1871, p. cxlvii.
* Steinhauser, ' Religion des Negers,' in ' Magaz. der Evang. Missions and
Bibel-Gesellschaften,' Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 139.
3 J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' pp. 217, 388.
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 13!
god and appease him with the promised sacrifice of a hog ;
these exorcists are a class of priests, and the people have
no other doctors. 1 Where the world-wide doctrine of
disease-demons has held sway, men's minds, full of spells
and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs
and regimen.
The cases in which disease-possession passes into oracle-
possession are especially connected with hysterical, convul-
sive, and epileptic affections. Mr. Backhouse describes a
Tasmanian native sorcerer, ' affected with fits of spasmodic
contraction of the muscles of one breast .which he attributes,
as they do all other diseases, to the devil ' ; this malady
served to prove his inspiration to his people. 2 When Dr.
Mason was preaching near a village of heathen Pwo, a man
fell down in an epileptic fit, his familiar spirit having come
over him to forbid the people to listen to the missionary,
and he sang out his denunciations like one frantic. This
man was afterwards converted, and told the missionary that
' he could not account for his former exercises, but that it
certainly appeared to him as though a spirit spoke, and he
must tell what was communicated.' In this Karen district
flourishes the native ' wee ' or prophet, whose business is
to work himself into the state in which he can see departed
spirits, visit their distant home, and even recall them to the
body, thus raising the dead ; these wees are nervous excit-
able men, such as would become mediums, and in giving
oracles they go into actual convulsions. 3 Dr. Callaway's
details of the state of the Zulu diviners are singularly in-
structive. Their symptoms are ascribed to possession by
' amatongo ' or ancestral spirits ; the disease is common,
from some it departs of its own accord, others have the
ghost laid which causes it, and others let the affection take
its course and become professional diviners, whose powers
of finding hidden things and giving apparently inaccessible
1 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' pp. 163, 170.
2 Backhouse, ' Australia,' p. 103.
3 Mason, ' Burmah,' p. 107, &c. Cross, I.e. p. 305.
132 ANIMISM.
information are vouched for by native witnesses, who at the
same time are not blind to their tricks and their failures.
The most perfect description is that of a hysterical vision-
ary, who had ' the disease which precedes the power to
divine.' This man describes that well-known symptom of
hysteria, the heavy weight creeping up within him to his
shoulders, his vivid dreams, his waking visions of objects
that are not there when he approaches, the songs that come
to him without learning, the sensation of flying in the air.
This man was ' of a family who are very sensitive, and be-
come doctors.' 1 Persons whose constitutional unsoundness
induces morbid manifestations are indeed marked out by
nature to become seers and sorcerers. Among the Pata-
gonians, patients seized with falling sickness or St. Vitus's
dance were at once selected for magicians, as chosen by the
demons themselves who possessed, distorted, and convulsed
them.* Among Siberian tribes, the shamans select children
liable to convulsions as suitable to be brought up to the
profession, which is apt to become hereditary with the
epileptic tendencies it belongs to. 8 Thus, even in the lower
culture, a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts begin to have
that power over the minds of their lustier fellows, which
they have kept in so remarkable a way through the course
of history.
Morbid oracular manifestations are habitually excited on
purpose, and moreover the professional sorcerer commonly
exaggerates or wholly feigns them. In the more genuine
manifestations the medium may be so intensely wrought
upon by the idea that a possessing spirit is speaking from
within him, that he may not only give this spirit's name and
speak in its character, but possibly may in good faith alter
his voice to suit the spiritual utterance. This gift of spirit-
utterance, which belongs to ' ventriloquism ' in the ancient
and proper sense of the term, of course lapses into sheer
1 Callaway, ' Religion of Amazulu,' pp. 183, &c., 259, &c.
1 Falkner, ' Patagonia,' p. 1 16. See also Rochefort, ' lies Antilles," p. 418
(Caribs).
8 Georgi, ' Reise im Russ. Reich,' vol. i. p. 280 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 488.
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 133
trickery. But that the phenomena should be thus artificially
excited or dishonestly counterfeited, rather confirms than
alters the present argument. Real or simulated, the details
of oracle-possession alike illustrate popular belief. The
Patagonian wizard begins his performance with drumming
and rattling till the real or pretended epileptic fit comes on
by the demon entering him, who then answers questions
from within him with a faint and mournful voice. 1 In
Southern India and Ceylon the so-called ' devil-dancers '
have to work themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspi-
ration whereby they profess to cure their patients.' So,
with furious dancing to the music and chanting of the
attendants, the Bodo priest brings on the fit of maniacal in-
spiration in which the deity fills him and gives oracles
through him. 8 In Kamchatka the female shamans, when
Billukai came down into them in a thunderstorm, would
prophesy ; or, receiving spirits with a cry of ' hush ! ' their
teeth chattered as in fever, and they were ready to divine. 4
Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the ' natzo '
or conjurer is sent for to a sick patient, he calls on his ' nat '
or demon, the soul of a deceased foreign prince, who descends
into him and gives the required answers. 8 In the Pacific
Islands, spirits of the dead would enter for a time the body
of a living man, inspiring him to declare future events, or
to execute some commission from the higher deities. The
symptoms of oracular possession among savages have been
especially well described in this region of the world. The
Fijian priest sits looking steadfastly at a whale's tooth
ornament, amid dead silence. In a few minutes he
trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs come on,
which increase to strong convulsions, with swelling of
the veins, murmurs and sobs. Now the god has entered
1 Falkner, I.e.
1 Caldwell, ' Dravidian Languages,' App. ; Latham, vol. ii. p. 469.
3 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' p. 172.
4 Steller, ' Kamtschatka," p. 278.
8 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 328, see vol. iii. p. 201, ' Psychologic,'
p. 139. See also Romer, ' Guinea,' p. 59.
134 ANIMISM.
him, and with eyes rolling and protruding, unnatural voice,
pale face and livid lips, sweat streaming from every
pore, and the whole aspect of a furious madman, he gives
the divine answer, and then, the symptoms subsiding, he
looks round with a vacant stare, and the deity returns to
the land of spirits. In the Sandwich Islands, where the
god Oro thus gave his oracles, his priest ceased to act or
speak as a voluntary agent, but with his limbs convulsed,
his features distorted and terrific, his eyes wild and strained,
he would roll on the ground foaming at the mouth, and
reveal the will of the possessing god in shrill cries and
sounds violent and indistinct, which the attending priests
duly interpreted to the people. In Tahiti, it was often
noticed that men who in the natural state showed neither
ability nor eloquence, would in such convulsive delirium
burst forth into earnest lofty declamation, declaring the will
and answers of the gods, and prophesying future events,
in well-knit harangues full of the poetic figure and meta-
phor of the professional orator. But when the fit was over,
and sober reason returned, the prophet's gifts were gone. 1
Lastly, the accounts of oracular possession in Africa show
the primitive ventriloquist in perfect types of morbid
knavery. In Sofala, after a king's funeral, his soul would
enter into a sorcerer, and speaking in the familiar tones
that all the bystanders recognized, would give counsel to
the new monarch how to govern his people. 8 About a
century ago, a negro fetish- woman of Guinea is thus
described in the act of answering an enquirer who has come
to consult her. She is crouching on the earth, with her
head between her knees and her hands up to her face, till,
becoming inspired by the fetish, she snorts and foams and
gasps. Then the suppliant may put his question, ' Will
my friend or brother get well of this sickness ? ' ' What
shall I give thee to set him free from his sickness ? ' and so
1 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. pp. 352, 373 ; Moercnhout, ' Voyage,' vol. i.
p. 479 ; Mariner, ' Tonga Islands,' vol. i. p. 105 ; Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i. p. 373.
* Dos Santos, ' Ethiopia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 686.
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 135
forth. Then the fetish-woman answers in a thin, whistling
voice, and with the old-fashioned idioms of generations
past ; and thus the suppliant receives his command, perhaps
to kill a white cock and put him at a four-cross way, or tie
him up for the fetish to come and fetch him, or perhaps
merely to drive a dozen wooden pegs into the ground, so to
bury his friend's disease with them. 1
The details of demoniacal possession among barbaric and
civilized nations need no elaborate description, so simply
do they continue the savage cases. 8 But the state of things
we notice here agrees with the conclusion that the posses-
sion-theory belongs originally to the lower culture, and is
gradually superseded by higher medical knowledge. Survey-
ing its course through the middle and higher civilization, we
shall notice first a tendency to limit it to certain peculiar
and severe affections, especially connected with mental dis-
order, such as epilepsy, hysteria, delirium, idiocy, madness ;
and after this a tendency to abandon it altogether, in con-
sequence of the persistent opposition of the medical faculty.
Among the nations of South-East Asia, obsession and pos-
sessions by demons is strong at least in popular belief. The
Chinese attacked with dizziness, or loss of the use of his
limbs, or other unaccountable disease, knows that he has
been influenced by a malignant demon, or punished for some
offence by a deity whose name he will mention, or affected
by his wife of a former existence, whose spirit has after a
long search discovered him. Exorcism of course exists, and
when the evil spirit or influence is expelled, it is especially
apt to enter some person standing near ; hence the common
saying, ' idle spectators should not be present at an exor-
cism.' Divination by possessed mediums is usual in China :
among such is the professional woman who sits at a table in
contemplation, till the soul of a deceased person from whom
1 Romer, ' Guinea,' p. 57. See also Steinhauser, I.e. pp. 132, 139 ; J. B.
Schlegel, ' Ewe-Sprache,' p. xvi.
1 Details from Tatar races in Castrln, ' Finn. Myth.' pp. 164, 173, Sic. ;
Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 90 ; from Abyssinia in Parkyns, ' Life in A.,' ch.
xxxiii.
136 ANIMISM.
communication is desired enters her body and talks through
her to the living ; also the man into whom a deity is brought
by invocations and mesmeric passes, when, assuming the
divine figure and attitude, he pronounces the oracle. 1 In
Burma, the fever-demon of the jungle seizes trespassers on
his domain, and shakes them in ague till he is exorcised,
while falls and apoplectic fits are the work of other spirits.
The dancing of women by demoniacal possession is treated
by the doctor covering their heads with a garment, and
thrashing them soundly with a stick, the demon and not the
patient being considered to feel the blows ; the possessing
spirit may be prevented from escaping by a knotted and
charmed cord hung round the bewitched person's neck, and
when a sufficient beating has induced it to speak by the
patient's voice and declare its name and business, it may
either be allowed to depart, or the doctor tramples on the
patient's stomach till the demon is stamped to death. For
an example of invocation and offerings, one characteristic
story told by Dr. Bastian will suffice. A Bengali cook was
seized with an apoplectic fit, which his Burmese wife declared
was but a just retribution, for the godless fellow had gone
day after day to market to buy pounds and pounds of meat,
yet in spite of her remonstrances would never give a morsel
to the patron-spirit of the town ; as a good wife, however,
she now did her best for her suffering husband, placing near
him little heaps of coloured rice for the 'nat,' and putting
on his fingers rings with prayers addressed to the same
offended being ' Oh ride him not ! ' ' Ah let him go ! '
' Grip him not so hard ! ' ' Thou shalt have rice ! '
' Ah, how good that tastes ! ' How explicitly Buddhism
recognizes such ideas, may be judged from one of the ques-
tions officially put to candidates for admission as monks or
talapoins ' Art thou afflicted by madness or the other ills
caused by giants, witches, or evil demons of the forest and
mountain ? ' 2 Within our own domain of British India,
1 Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. i. p. 143, vol. ii. pp. no, 320.
2 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. pp. 103, 152, 381, 418, vol. iii. p. 247,
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 137
the possession-theory and the rite of exorcism belonging
to it may be perfectly studied to this day. There the doc-
trine of sudden ailment or nervous disease being due to a
blast or possession by a ' bhut/ or being, that is, a demon,
is recognized as of old ; there the old witch who has pos-
sessed a man and made him sick or deranged, will answer
spiritually out of his body and say who she is and where she
lives ; there the frenzied demoniac may be seen raving,
writhing, tearing, bursting his bonds, till, subdued by the
exorcist, his fury subsides, he stares and sighs, falls help-
less to the ground, and comes to himself ; and there the
deities caused by excitement, singing, and incense to enter
into men's bodies, manifest their presence with the usual
hysterical or epileptic symptoms, and speaking in their own
divine name and personality, deliver oracles by the vocal
organs of the inspired medium. 1
In the Ancient Babylonian- Assyrian texts, the exorcism-
formulas show the doctrine of disease-demons in full de-
velopment, and similar opinions were current in ancient
Greece and Rome, to whose languages indeed our own owes
the technical terms of the subject, such as ' demoniac ' and
' exorcist.' Homer's sick men racked with pain are tor-
mented by a hateful demon (o-rvyepbs 6e ol |XP &HJI>).
' Epilepsy ' (cViA^ts) was, as its name imports, the ' seizure '
of the patient by a superhuman agent : the agent being
more exactly denned in ' nympholepsy,' the state of being
seized or possessed by a nymph, i.e., rapt or entranced
(vv/i4>oA.7j7TTos, lymphatus). The causation of mental de-
rangement and delirious utterance by spiritual possession
was an accepted tenet of Greek philosophy. To be insane
was simply to have an evil spirit, as when Sokrates said of
those who denied demonic or spiritual knowledge, that they
&c. See also Bowring, ' Siam,' vol. i. p. 139 ; ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iv.
p. 507, vol. vi. p. 614 ; Turpin, in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 761 ; Kempfer,
'Japan,' ibid. vol. vii. pp. 701, 730, &c.
1 Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 155, vol. ii. p. 183; Roberts, 'Oriental
Illustrations of the Scriptures,' p. 529 ; Bastian, ' Psychologic," pp. 164.,
184-7. Sanskrit paicacha-graha = demon-seizure, possession. Ancient evi-
dence in Pictet, ' Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. ch. v.
U, K
138 ANIMISM.
themselves were demoniac (8a.ifj.ovav !</j), and Alexander
ascribed to the influence of offended Dionysos the ungovern-
able drunken fury in which he killed his friend Kleitos ;
raving madness was obsession or possession by an evil
demon (xaKoSeu/ioi'ia). So the Romans called madmen
' larvati,' ' larvarum pleni,' full of ghosts. Patients pos-
sessed by demons stared and foamed, and the spirits spoke
from within them by their voices. The craft of the
exorcist was well known. As for oracular possession, its
theory and practice remained in fullest vigour through
the classic world, scarce altered from the times of lowest
barbarism. Could a South Sea Islander have gone to Delphi
to watch the convulsive struggles of the Pythia, and listen
to her raving, shrieking utterances, he would have needed
no explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity
with his own savage philosophy. 1
The Jewish doctrine of possession 2 at no time in its long
course exercised a direct influence on the opinion of the
civilized world comparable to that produced by the mentions
of demoniacal possession in the New Testament. It is
needless to quote here even a selection from the familiar
passages of the Gospels and Acts which display the manner
in which certain described symptoms were currently ac-
counted for in public opinion. Regarding these documents
from an ethnographic point of view, it need only be said
that they prove, incidentally but absolutely, that Jews and
Christians at that time held the doctrine which had pre-
vailed for ages before, and continued to prevail for ages
after, referring to possession and obsession by spirits the
symptoms of mania, epilepsy, dumbness, delirious and
oracular utterance, and other morbid conditions, mental and
bodily. 3 Modern missionary works, such as have been cited
1 Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64 ; Plat. Phaedr. Tim. &c. ; Pausan. iv.
27, 2 ; Xen. Mem. I. i. 9 ; Plutarch. Vit. Alex. ; DC Orac. Def. ; Lucian.
Philopseudes ; Petron. Arbiter, Sat. ; &c., &c.
- Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, ' Entdccktcs Judenthum,'
part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.
3 Matth. ix. 32, xi. 18, xii. 22, xvii. 15 ; Mark, i. 23, ix. 17 ; Luke, iv.
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 139
here, give the most striking evidence of the correspondence
of these demoniac symptoms with such as may still be
observed among uncivilized races. During the early
centuries of Christianity, demoniacal possession indeed
becomes peculiarly conspicuous, perhaps not from unusual
valence of the animistic theory of disease, but simply
because a period of intense religious excitement brought it
more than usually into requisition. Ancient ecclesiastical
records describe, under the well-known names of ' dae-
moniacs ' (Saifjiovi^onevoL), ' possessed ' (KaTfxoufvoi) > ' ener-
gumens ' (evepyov/ievot), the class of persons whose bodies
are seized or possessed by an evil spirit ; such attacks
being frequently attended with great commotions and vexa-
tions and disturbances of the body, occasioning sometimes
frenzy and madness, sometimes epileptic fits, and other
violent tossings and contortions. These energumens formed
recognized part of an early Christian congregation, a
standing-place apart being assigned to them in the church.
(The church indeed seems to have been the principal habita-
tion of these afflicted creatures, they were occupied out
of service-time in such work as sweeping, daily food was
provided for them, and they were under the charge of a
special order of clergy, the exorcists, whose religious func-
tion was to cast out devils by prayer and adjuration and lay-
ing on of hands. As to the usual symptoms of possession,
Justin, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Minucius, Cyprian,
and other early Fathers, give copious descriptions of demons
entering into the bodies of men, disordering their health and
minds, driving them to wander among the tombs, forcing
them to writhe and wallow and rave and foam, howling and
declaring their own diabolical names by the patients' voices,
but when overcome by conjuration or by blows administered
to their victims, quitting the bodies they had entered, and
acknowledging the pagan deities to be but devils. 1
33, 39, vii. 33, viii. 27, ix. 39, xiii. n ; John, x. 20; Acts, xvi. 16, xix.
13; &c.
1 For general evidence see Bingham, ' Antiquities of Christian Church,'
I4<> ANIMISM.
On a subject so familiar to educated readers I may be
excused from citing at length a vast mass of documents,
barbaric in nature and only more or less civilized in circum-
stance, to illustrate the continuance of the doctrine of pos-
session and the rite of exorcism through the middle ages
and into modern times. A few salient examples will suffice.
For a type of medical details, we may instance the recipes
in the ' Early English Leechdoms ' : a cake of the ' thost '
of a white hound baked with meal is to be taken against the
attack by. dwarves (i.e. convulsions) ; a drink of herbs
worked up off clear ale with the aid of garlic, holy water,
and singing of masses, is to be drunk by a fiend-sick patient
out of a church bell. Philosophical argument may be fol-
lowed in the dissertations of the ' Malleus Maleficarum/
concerning demons substantially inhabiting men and causing
illness in them, enquiries which may be pursued under the
auspices of Glanvil in the ' Saducismus Triumphatus.'
Historical anecdote bears record of the convulsive clair-
voyant demon who possessed Nicola Aubry, and under the
Bishop of Laon's exorcism testified in an edifying manner
to the falsity of Calvinism ; of Charles VI. of France, who
was possessed, and whose demon a certain priest tried in
vain to transfer into the bodies of twelve men who were
chained up to receive it ; of the German woman at Elbin-
gerode who in a fit of toothache wished the devil might
enter into her teeth, and who was possessed by six demons
accordingly, which gave their names as Schalk der
Wahrheit, Wirk, Widerkraut, Myrrha, Knip, Stiip ; of
George Lukins of Yatton, whom seven devils threw into
fits and talked and sang and barked out of, and who was
delivered by a solemn exorcism by seven clergymen at the
Temple Church at Bristol in the year I788. 1 A strong
book iii. ch. iv. ; Calmet, ' Dissertation sur les Esprits ' ; Maury, ' Magic,'
&c. ; Lccky,' Hist, of Rationalism.' Among particular passages arc Tertull.
Apolog. 23 ; De Spectaculis, 26 ; Chrysostom. Homil. xxviii. in Matth. iv. ;
Cyril. Hierosol. Catech. xvi. 16 ; Minuc. Fel. Octavius. xxi. ; Concil. Cart hag.
iv. ; &c.. &c.
1 Details in Cockayne, ' Lccchdoms, &c., of Early England,' vol. i. p. 365,
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION. 14!
sense of the permanence of the ancient doctrine may be
gained from accounts of the state of public opinion in
Europe, from Greece and Italy to France, where within the
last century derangement and hysteria were still popularly
ascribed to possession and treated by exorcism, just as in
the dark ages. 1 In the year 1861, at Morzine, at the south
of the Lake of Geneva, there might be seen in full fury an
epidemic of diabolical possession worthy of a Red Indian
settlement or a negro kingdom of West Africa, an outburst
which the exorcisms of a superstitious priest had so aggra-
vated that there were a hundred and ten raving demoniacs
in that single village.* The following is from a letter
written in 1862 by Mgr. Anouilh, a French missionary-
bishop in China. ' Le croiriez-vous ? dix villages se sont
convertis. Le diable est furieux et fait les cent coups. II y
a eu, pendant les quinze jours que je viens de prficher, cinq
ou six possessions. Nos cate'chumenes avec 1'eau be"nite
chassent les diables, gue"rissent les malades. J'ai vu des
choses merveilleuses. Le diable m'est d'un grand secours
pour convertir les paiens. Comme au temps de Notre-
Seigneur, quoique pere du mensonge, il ne peut s'empcher
de dire la verite. Voyez ce pauvre posse'de' faisant mille
contorsions et disant a grands cris : ' Pourquoi pre"ches-tu
la vraie religion ? Je ne puis souffrir que tu m'enleves mes
disciples.' ' Comment t'appelles-tu ? ' lui demande le cate"-
chiste. Apres quelques refus : ' Je suis I'envoye" de Lucifer '
' Combien tes-vous ? ' ' Nous sommes vingt-deux.'
' L'eau benite et le signe de la croix ont delivre ce posse'de'. ' 8
To conclude the series with a modern spiritualistic instance,
vol. ii. p. 137, 355; Sprenger, 'Malleus Maleficarum,' part ii.; Calmet,
' Dissertation,' vol. i. ch. xxiv. ; Horst, ' Zauber-Bibliothek ' ; Bastian,
4 Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 557, &c.; 'Psychologic,' p. 115, &c. ; Voltaire,
' Questions sur 1'Encyclopidie,' art., ' Superstition ' ; ' Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica,' 5th ed. art. ' Possession.'
1 See Maury, ' Magie,' &c., part ii. ch. ii.
1 A. Contans, ' Rel. sur une Epidemic d'Hyst6ro-De'monopathie, en 1861.'
2nd ed. Paris, 1863. For descriptions of such outbreaks, among the North
American Indians, see Le Jeune in ' Rel. des Je"s. dans la Nouvelle France,'
1639 > Brinton, p. 275 ; and in Guinea, tee J.L.Wilson,' Western Africa,' p. 217.
8 Gaume/L'Eau Benite au Dix-Neuvieme Siecle,' 3rd <?d.Paris,i866, p. 353.
142 ANIMISM.
one of those where the mediums feel themselves entered and
acted though by a spirit other than their own soul. The
Rev. Mr. West of Philadelphia describes how a certain pos-
sessed medium went through the sword exercise, and fell
down senseless ; when he came to himself again, the spirit
within him declared itself to be the soul of a deceased ancestor
of the minister's, who had fought and died in the American
War. 1 We in England now hardly hear of demoniacal posses-
sion except as a historical doctrine of divines. We have dis-
carded from religious services the solemn ceremony of casting
out devils from the bodies of the possessed, a rite to this day
officially retained in the Rituals of the Greek and Roman
Churches. Cases of diabolical influence alleged from time
to time among ourselves are little noticed except by news-
paper paragraphs on superstition and imposture. If, how-
ever, we desire to understand the doctrine of possession, its
origin and influence in the world, we must look beyond
countries where public opinion has passed into this stage,
and must study the demoniac theory as it still prevails in
lower and lowest levels of culture.
It has to be thoroughly understood that the changed aspect
of the subject in modern opinion is not due to disappearance
of the actual manifestations which early philosophy attri-
buted to demoniacal influence. Hysteria and epilepsy,
delirium and mania, and such like bodily and mental de-
rangement, still exist. Not only do they still exist, but
among the lower races, and in superstitious districts among
the higher, they are still explained and treated as of old. It
is not too much to assert that the doctrine of demoniacal
possession is kept up, substantially the same theory to
account for substantially the same facts, by half the human
race, who thus stand as consistent representatives of their
forefathers back into primitive antiquity. It is in the
civilized world, under the influence of the medical doctrines
which have been developing since classic times, that the
early animistic theory of these morbid phenomena has been
1 West, in ' Spiritual Telegraph,' cited by Bastian.
FETISHISM. 143
gradually superseded by views more in accordance with
modern science, to the great gain of our health and happi-
ness. The transition which has taken place in the famous
insane colony of Gheel in Belgium is typical. In old days,
the lunatics were carried there in crowds to be exorcised
from their demons at the church of St. Dymphna ; to Gheel
they still go, but the physician reigns in the stead of the
exorcist. Yet wherever, in times old or new, demoniacal
influences are brought forward to account for affections
which scientific physicians now explain on a different
principle, care must be taken not to misjudge the ancient
(joctrine and its place in history. As belonging to the
lower culture it is a perfectly rational philosophical theory
to account for certain pathological facts. But just as
mechanical astronomy gradually superseded the animistic
astronomy of the lower races, so biological pathology gra-
dually supersedes animistic pathology, the immediate opera-
tion of personal spiritual beings in both cases giving place
to the operation of natural processes.
We now pass to the consideration of another great branch
of the lower religion of the world, a development of the
same principles of spiritual operation with which we have
become familiar in the study of the possession-theory. This
is the doctrine of Fetishism. Centuries ago, the Portu-
guese in West Africa, noticing the veneration paid by the
negroes to certain objects, such as trees, fish, plants, idols,
pebbles, claws of beasts, sticks and so forth, very fairly
compared these objects to the amulets or talismans with
which they were themselves familiar, and called them fcitifo
or ' charm,' a word derived from Latin /actitins, in the
sense of ' magically artful.' Modern French and English
adopted this word from the Portuguese as fetiche, fetish,
although curiously enough both languages had already pos-
sessed the word for ages in a different sense, Old French
faitis, ' well made, beautiful,' which Old English adopted
as fetys, ' well made, neat.' It occurs in the commonest of
all quotations from Chaucer :
144 ANIMISM.
And Frensch sche spak ful faire and fetysly,
Aftur the scole of Stratford atte Bowc,
For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.'
The President de Brasses, a most original thinker of the
1 8th century, struck by the descriptions of the African wor-
ship of material and terrestrial objects, introduced the word
Fetichisme as a general descriptive term, 1 and since then it
has obtained great currency by Comte's use of it to denote
a general theory of primitive religion, in which external
objects are regarded as animated by a life analogous to
man's. It seems to me, however, more convenient to use
the word Animism for the doctrine of spirits in general, and
to confine the word Fetishism to that subordinate department
which it properly belongs to, namely, the doctrine of spirits
embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through,
certain material objects. Fetishism will be taken as in-
cluding the worship of ' stocks and stones,' and thence it
passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry.
Any object whatsoever may be a fetish. Of course, among
the endless multitude of objects, not as we should say
physically active, but to which ignorant men ascribe mys-
terious power, we are not to apply indiscriminately the idea
of their being considered vessels or vehicles or instruments
of spiritual beings. They may be mere signs or tokens set
up to represent ideal notions or ideal beings, as fingers or
sticks are set up to represent numbers. Or they may be
symbolic charms working by imagined conveyance of their
special properties, as an iron ring to give firmness, or a
kite's foot to give swift flight. Or they may be merely re-
garded in some undefined way as wondrous ornaments or
curiosities. The tendency runs through all human nature
to collect and admire objects remarkable in beauty, form,
quality, or scarceness. The shelves of ethnological museums
show heaps of the objects which the lower races treasure up
1 (C. de Brosses.) ' Du culte des dieux fetiches ou Parallele de 1'ancienne
Religion de 1'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie.' 1760. [De
Brosses supposed the word fetiche connected with chose fee, fatum.]
FETISHISM. 145
and hang about their persons teeth and claws, roots and
berries, shells and stones, and the like. Now fetishes are in
great measure selected from among such things as these, and
the principle of their attraction for savage minds is clearly
the same which still guides the superstitious peasant in
collecting curious trifles ' for luck.' The principle is one
which retains its force in far higher ranges of culture than
the peasant's. Compare the Ostyak's veneration for any
peculiar little stone he has picked up, with the Chinese love
of collecting curious varieties of tortoise-shell, or an old-
fashioned English conchologist's delight in a reversed shell.
The turn of mind which in a Gold-Coast negro would mani-
fest itself in a museum of monstrous and most potent
fetishes, might impel an Englishman to collect scarce
postage-stamps or queer walking-sticks. In the love of
abnormal curiosities there shows itself a craving for the
marvellous, an endeavour to get free from the tedious sense
of law and uniformity in nature. As to the lower races,
were evidence more plentiful as to the exact meaning they
attach to objects which they treat with mysterious respect,
it would very likely appear more often and more certainly
than it does now, that these objects seem to them connected
with the action of spirits, so as to be, in the strict sense in
which the word is here used, real fetishes. But this must
not be taken for granted. To class an object as a fetish,
demands explicit statement that a spirit is considered as
embodied in it or acting through it or communicating by it,
or at least that the people it belongs to do habitually think
this of such objects ; or it must be shown that the object
is treated as having personal consciousness and power, is
talked with, worshipped, prayed to, sacrificed to, petted or
ill-treated with reference to its past or future behaviour to
its votaries. In the instances now selected, it will be seen
that in one way or another they more or less satisfy such
conditions. In investigating the exact significance of fetishes
in use among men, savage or more civilized, the peculiar
difficulty is to know whether the effect of the object is
146 ANIMISM.
thought due to a whole personal spirit embodied in or
attached to it, or to some less definable influence exerted
through it. In some cases this point is made clear, but
in many it remains doubtful.
It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a
fetish, to glance at a curious group of nations which con-
nect a disease at once with spiritual influence, and with the
presence of some material object. They are a set of illus-
trations of the savage principle, that a disease or an actual
disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or
such-like material object. Among the natives of Australia,
one hears of the sorcerers extracting from their own bodies
by passes and manipulations a magical essence called
' boylya,' which they can make to enter the patient's body
like pieces of quartz, which causes pain there and consumes
the flesh, and may be magically extracted either as invisible
or in the form of a bit of quartz. Even the spirit of the
waters, ' nguk-wonga,' which had caused an attack of
erysipelas in a boy's leg (he had been bathing too long
when heated) is declared to have been extracted by the
conjurers from the affected part in the shape of a sharp
stone. 1 The Caribs, who very distinctly referred diseases
to the action of hostile demons or deities, had a similar
sorcerer's process of extracting thorns or splinters from the
affected part as the peccant causes, and it is said that in
the Antilles morsels of stone and bone so extracted were
wrapped up in cotton by the women, as protective fetishes
in childbirth. 2 The Malagasy, considering all diseases as
inflicted by an evil spirit, consult a diviner, whose method
is often to remove the disease by means of a ' faditra ; '
this is some object, such as a little grass, ashes, a sheep, a
pumpkin, the water the patient has rinsed his mouth with,
or what not, and when the priest has counted on it the evils
1 Grey, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 337 ; Eyre, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 362 ;
Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 235, &c.; G. F. Moore, ' Vocab. of
S. W. Austr.' pp. 18, 98, 103. See Bonwick, ' Tasmanians,' p. 195.
8 Rochefort, 'lies Antilles,' pp. 419, 508 ; J. G. Miiller, pp. 173, 207, 217.
FETISHISM. 147
that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to take
them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with
it. 1 Among those strong believers in disease-spirits, the
Dayaks of Borneo, the priest, waving and jingling charms
over the affected part of the patient, pretends to extract
stones, splinters, and bits of rag, which he declares are
spirits ; of such evil spirits he will occasionally bring half-
a-dozen out of a man's stomach, and as he is paid a fee of
six gallons of rice for each, he is probably disposed (like a
chiropodist under similar circumstances) to extract a good
many. 2 The most instructive accounts of this kind are
those which reach us from Africa. Dr. Callaway has taken
down at length a Zulu account of the method of stopping
out disease caused by spirits of the dead. If a widow is
troubled by her late husband's ghost coming and talking to
her night after night as though still alive, till her health is
affected and she begins to waste away, they find a ' nyanga '
or sorcerer who can bar out the disease. He bids her not
lose the spittle collected in her mouth while she is dream-
ing, and gives her medicine to chew when she wakes. Then
he goes with her to lay the ' itongo,' or ghost ; perhaps
he shuts it up in a bulb of the inkomfe plant, making a
hole in the side of this, putting in the medicine and the
dream-spittle, closing the hole with a stopper, and re-
planting the bulb. Leaving the place, he charges her not
to look back till she gets home. Thus the dream is barred ;
it may still come occasionally, but no longer infests the
woman ; the doctor prevails over the dead man as regards
that dream. In other cases the cure of a sick man attacked
by the ancestral spirits may be effected with some of his
blood put into a hole in an anthill by the doctor, who closes
the hole with a stone, and departs without looking back ; or
the patient may be scarified over the painful place, and the
blood put into the mouth of a frog, caught for the purpose
and carried back. So the disease is barred out from the
1 Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.
2 St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 211, see 72.
148 ANIMISM.
man. 1 In West Africa, a case in point is the practice of
transferring a sick man's ailment to a live fowl, which is set
free with it, and if any one catches the fowl, the disease
goes to him. 1 Captain Burton's account from Central Africa
is as follows. Disease being possession by a spirit or ghost,
the ' mganga ' or sorcerer has to expel it, the principal
remedies being drumming, dancing, and drinking, till at
last the spirit is enticed from the body of the patient into
some inanimate article, technically called a ' keti ' or stool
for it. This may be an ornament, such as a peculiar bead
or a leopard's claw, or it may be a nail or rag, which by
being driven into or hung to a ' devil's tree ' has the effect
of laying the disease-spirit. Or disease-spirits may be ex-
tracted by chants, one departing at the end of each stave,
when a little painted stick made for it is flung on the
ground, and some patients may have as many as a dozen
ghosts extracted, for here also the fee is so much apiece.*
In Siam, the Laos sorcerer can send his ' phi phob ' or
demon into a victim's body, where it turns into a fleshy or
leathery lump, and causes disease ending in death. 4 Thus,
on the one hand, the spirit-theory of disease is seen to
be connected with that sorcerer's practice prevalent among
the lower races, of pretending to extract objects from
the patient's body, such as stones, bones, balls of hair,
&c., which are declared to be causes of disease conveyed
by magical means into him ; of this proceeding I have
given a detailed account elsewhere, under the name of
the ' sucking-cure.' 6 On the other hand, there appears
among the lower races that well-known conception of a
disease or evil influence as an individual being, which may
be not merely conveyed by an infected object (though this
of course may have much to do with the idea), but may be
1 Callawar, ' Religion of Amazulu,' p. 314.
1 Steinhauser, I.e. p. 141. See also Steere, ' East Afr. Tribe*,' in ' Journ.
Anthrop. Soc.' vol. i. p. cxlviii.
' Burton, ' Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 352. See ' Sindh,' p. 177.
4 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 275.
' Early Hist, of Mankind,' ch.x. See Haitian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 116, &c.
FETISHISM. 149
removed by actual transfer from the patient into some other
animal or object. Thus Pliny informs us how pains in the
stomach may be cured by transmitting the ailment from the
patient's body into a puppy or duck, which will probably
die of it ; * it is considered baneful to a Hindu woman to be
a man's third wife, wherefore the precaution is taken of
first betrothing him to a tree, which dies in her stead;'
after the birth of a Chinese baby, its father's trousers are
hung in the room wrong side up, that all evil influences
may enter into them instead of into the child.* Modern
folklore still cherishes such ideas. The ethnographer may
still study in the ' white witchcraft ' of European peasants
the arts of curing a man's fever or headache by transferring
it to a crawfish or a bird, or of getting rid of ague or gout
or warts by giving them to a willow, elder, fir, or ash-tree,
with suitable charms, ' Goe morgen, olde, ick geef oe de
Kolde/ ' Goden Abend, Herr Fleder, hier bring ick mien
Feber, ick bind em di an und gah davan,' ' Ash-tree,
ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me,' and so forth ; or of
nailing or plugging an ailment into a tree-trunk, or con-
veying it away by some of the patient's hair or nail-parings
or some such thing, and so burying it. Looking at these
proceedings from a moral point of view, the practice of
transferring the ailment to a knot or a lock of hair and
burying it is the most harmless, but another device is a
very pattern of wicked selfishness. In England, warts may
be touched each with a pebble, and the pebbles in a bag left
on the road to church, to give up their ailments to the un-
lucky finder ; in Germany, a plaister from a sore may be
left at a cross-way to transfer the disease to a passer-by ;
I am told on medical authority that the bunches of flowers
which children offer to travellers in Southern Europe are
sometimes intended for the ungracious purpose of sending
some disease away from their homes. 4 One case of this
1 Plin. xxx. 14, 20. Cardan, ' De Var. Rerum,' cap. xliii.
* Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 134, vol. ii. p. 247.
3 Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. i. p. 122.
* Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 1118-23 Wuttke, ' Volksabcrglaube,' pp. 155-70 i
150 ANIMISM.
group, mentioned to me by Mr. Spottiswoode, is particu-
larly interesting. In Thuringia it is considered that a
string of rowan-berries, a rag, or any small article, touched
by a sick person and then hung on a bush beside some
forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may
touch this article in passing, and frees the sick person from
the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Bur-
ton's suggestion that the rags, locks of hair, and what not,
hung on trees near sacred places by the superstitious from
Mexico to India and from Ethiopia to Ireland, are depo-
sited there as actual receptacles of disease ; the African
' devil's trees ' and the sacred trees of Sindh, hung with
rags through which votaries have transferred their com-
plaints, being typical cases of a practice surviving in lands
of higher culture.
The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to
objects may be human souls. Indeed one of the most
natural cases of the fetish-theory is when a soul inhabits or
haunts what is left of its former body. It is plain enough
that by a simple association of ideas the dead person is
imagined to keep up a connexion with his remains. Thus
we read of the Mandan women going year after year to take
food to the skulls of their dead kinsfolk, and sitting by the
hour to chat and jest in their most endearing strain with
the relics of a husband or child ; l thus the Guinea negroes,
who keep the bones of parents in chests, will go to talk
with them in the little huts which serve for their tombs.'
And thus, from the savage who keeps and carries with his
household property the cleaned bones of his forefathers, 3 to
Brand, ' Pop. Ant.' vol. ii. p. 375, vol. iii. p. 286 ; Halliwell, ' Pop. Rhymes,'
p. 208 ; R. Hunt, ' Pop. Romances," 2nd Series, p. 211 ; Hylten-Cavallius,
' Warend och Wirdarne,' vol. i. p. 173. It is said, however, that rags
fastened on trees by Gypsies, which passers-by avoid with horror as having
diseases thus banned into them, are only signs left for the information of
fellow vagrants ; Liebich, ' Die Zigeuner," p. 96.
1 Catlin, ' N. A. Indians,' vol. i. p. 90.
2 J. L. Wilson, ' W. Africa,' p. 394.
3 Meiners, ' Gesch. der Rel.' vol. i. p. 305 ; J. G. Muller, p. 209.
FETISHISM. 151
the mourner among ourselves who goes to weep at the grave
of one beloved, imagination keeps together the personality
and. the relics of the dead. Here, then, is a course of
thought open to the animistic thinker, leading him on from
fancied association to a belief in the real presence of a
spiritual being in a material object. Thus there is no
difficulty in understanding how the Karens thought the
spirits of the dead might come back from the other world
to reanimate their bodies ; l nor how the Marian islanders
should have kept the dried bodies of their dead ancestors
in their huts as household gods, and even expected them to
give oracles out of their skulls; 2 nor how the soul of a
dead Carib might be thought to abide in one of his bones,
taken from the grave and carefully wrapped in cotton, in
which state it could answer questions, and even bewitch an
enemy if a morsel of his property were wrapped up with it ; 3
nor how the dead Santal should be sent to his fathers by the
ceremony of committing to the sacred river morsels of his
skull from the funeral-pile. 4 Such ideas are of great interest
in studying the burial rites of mankind, especially the habit
of keeping relics of the dead as vehicles of superhuman
power, and of even preserving the whole body as a mummy,
as in Peru and Egypt. The conception of such human
relics becoming fetishes, inhabited or at least acted through
by the souls which formerly belonged to them, will give a
rational explanation of much relic-worship otherwise
obscure.
A further stretch of imagination enables the lower races
to associate the souls of the dead with mere objects, a
practice which may have had its origin in the merest child-
ish make-believe, but which would lead a thorough savage
animist straight on to the conception of the soul entering
1 Mason, Karens, I.e. p. 231.
2 Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 721-3.
3 Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 418. See Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i.
p. 485 (Yumanas swallow ashes of deceased with liquor, that he may live
again in them).
4 Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 210. See Bastian, 'Psychologic,' p. 73;
J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrel.' pp. 209, 262, 289, 401, 419.
152 ANIMISM.
the object as a body. Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women
in Keeling Island who held a wooden spoon dressed in
clothes like a doll ; this spoon had been carried to the grave
of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact
lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat
at a modern spirit-stance. 1 Among the Salish Indians of
Oregon, the conjurers bring back men's lost souls as little
stones or bones or splinters, and pretend to pass them down
through the tops of their heads into their hearts, but great
care must be taken to remove the spirits of any dead
people that may be in the lot, for the patient receiving one
would die. 1 There are indigenous Kol tribes of India who
work out this idea curiously in bringing back the soul of a
deceased man into the house after the funeral, apparently
to be worshipped as a household spirit ; while some catch
the spirit re-embodied in a fowl or fish, the Bin j war of Rae-
pore bring it home in a pot of water, and the Bunjia in a
pot of flour.* The Chinese hold such theories with extreme
distinctness, considering one of a man's three spirits to take
up its abode in the ancestral tablet, where it receives
messages and worship from the survivors ; while the long
keeping of the dead man's gilt and lacquered coffin, and the
reverence and offerings continued at the tomb, are connected
with the thought of a spirit lingering about the corpse.
Consistent with these quaint ideas are ceremonies in vogue
in China, of bringing home in a cock (live or artificial) the
spirit of a man deceased in a distant place, and of enticing
into a sick man's coat the departing spirit which has already
left his body, and so conveying it back. 4 Tatar folklore
illustrates the idea of soul-embodiment in the quaint but
intelligible story of the demon-giant who could not be slain,
for he did not keep his soul in his body, but in a twelve-
1 Darwin, ' Journal,' p. 458.
* Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 320.
* ' Report of Jubbulpore Ethnological Committee,' Nagpore, 1868, part i.
p. 5.
4 Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. i. pp. 151, 207, 214, vol. ii. p. 401 ; see Plath,
' Religion der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 59, part ii. p. 101.
FETISHISM. 153
headed snake carried in a bag on his horse's back ; the hero
finds out the secret and kills the snake, and then the giant
dies too. This tale is curious, as very likely indicating the
original sense of a well-known group of stories in European
folklore, the Scandinavian one, for instance, where the giant
cannot be made an end of, because he keeps his heart not
in his body, but in a duck's egg in a well far away ; at last
the young champion finds the egg and crushes it, and the
giant bursts. 1 Following the notion of soul-embodiment
into civilized times, we learn that ' A ghost may be laid for
any term less than an hundred years, and in any place or
body, full or empty ; as, a solid oak the pommel of a sword
a barrel of beer, if a yeoman or simple gentleman or a
pipe of wine, if an esquire or a justice.' This is from
Grose's bantering description in the i8th century of the art
of ' laying ' ghosts,* and it is one of the many good instances
of articles of serious savage belief surviving as jests among
civilized men.
Thus other spiritual beings, roaming free about the world,
find fetish-objects to act through, to embody themselves in,
to present them visibly to their votaries. It is extremely
difficult to draw a distinct line of separation between the
two prevailing sets of ideas relating to spiritual action
through what we call inanimate objects. Theoretically we
can distinguish the notion of the object acting as it were by
the will and force of its own proper soul or spirit, from the
notion of some foreign spirit entering its substance or act-
ing on it from without, and so using it as a body or instru-
ment. But in practice these conceptions blend almost
inextricably. This state of things is again a confirmation
of the theory of animism here advanced, which treats both
sets of ideas as similar developments of the same original
1 Castrin, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 187; Dasent, 'Norse Tales,' p. 69; Lane,
'Thousand and One Nights,' vol. iii. p 4 316; Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 1033.
See also Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 213. Eisenmenger, ' Judenthum,' part
ii. p. 39.
2 Brand, ' Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. p. 72.
154 ANIMISM.
idea, that of the human soul, so that they may well shade
imperceptibly into one another. To depend on some
typical descriptions of fetishism and its allied doctrines in
different grades of culture, is a safer mode of treatment than
to attempt too accurate a general definition.
There is a quaint story, dating from the time of Columbus,
which shows what mysterious personality and power rude
tribes could attach to lifeless matter. The cacique Hatuey,
it is related, heard by his spies in Hispaniola that the
Spaniards were coming to Cuba. So he called his people
together, and talked to them of the Spaniards how they
persecuted the natives of the islands, and how they did such
things for the sake of a great lord whom they much desired
and loved. Then, taking out a basket with gold in it, he
said, ' Ye see here their lord whom they serve and go after ;
and, as ye have heard, they are coming hither to seek this
lord. Therefore let us make him a feast, that when they
come he may tell them not to do us harm.' So they danced
and sang from night to morning before the gold-basket, and
then the cacique told them not to keep the Christian's lord
anywhere, for if they kept him in their very bowels they
would have to bring him out ; so he bade them cast him to
the bottom of the river, and this they did. 1 If this story
be thought too good to be true, at any rate it does not
exaggerate authentic savage ideas. The ' maraca ' or cere-
monial rattle, used by certain rude Brazilian tribes, was an
eminent fetish. It was a calabash with a handle and a hole
for a mouth, and stones inside ; yet to its votaries it seemed
no mere rattle, but the receptacle of a spirit that spoke from
it when shaken ; therefore the Indians set up their maracas,
talked to them, set food and drink and burned incense be-
fore them, held annual feasts in their honour, and would
even go to war with their neighbours to satisfy the rattle-
spirits' demand for human victims.* Among the North
American Indians, the fetish-theory seems involved in that
1 Hen-era, ' Hist, de las Indias Occidentals, ' Dec. i. be. 3.
1 Lery, Bresil, p. 249 ; J. G. Miiller, pp. 210, 262.
FETISHISM. 155
remarkable and general proceeding known as getting
' medicine.' Each youth obtains in a vision or dream a
sight of his medicine, and considering how thoroughly the
idea prevails that the forms seen in visions and dreams are
spirits, this of itself shows the animistic nature of the
matter. The medicine thus seen may be an animal, or part
of one, such as skin or claws, feather or shell, or such a
thing as a plant, a stone, a knife, a pipe ; this object he
must obtain, and thenceforward through life it becomes his
protector. Considered as a vehicle or receptacle of a spirit,
its fetish-nature is shown in many ways ; its owner will do
homage to it, make feasts in its honour, sacrifice horses,
dogs, and other valuable objects to it or its spirit, fast to
appease it if offended, have it burned with him to conduct
him as a guardian-spirit to the happy hunting-grounds.
Beside these special protective objects, the Indians, especially
the medicine-men (the word is French, ' medecin/ applied
to these native doctors or conjurers, and since stretched to
take in all that concerns their art), use multitudes of other
fetishes as means of spiritual influence. 1 Among the
Turanian tribes of Northern Asia, where Castren describes
the idea of spirits contained in material objects, to which
they belong, and wherein they dwell in the same incompre-
hensible way as the souls in a man's body, we may notice
the Ostyak's worship of objects of scarce or peculiar quality,
and also the connexion of the shamans or sorcerers with
fetish-objects, as where the Tatars consider the innumer-
able rags and tags, bells and bits of iron, that adorn the
shaman's magic costume, to contain spirits helpful to their
owner in his magic craft. 2 John Bell, in his journey across
Asia in 1719, relates a story which well illustrates Mongol
ideas as to the action of self-moving objects. A certain
Russian merchant told him that once some pieces of damask
1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes ' ; Waitz, vol. iii. ; Catlin, 'N. A. Ind.' vol. i.
p. 36 ; Keating, ' Narrative,' vol. i. p. 421 ; J. G. Miiller, p. 74, &c. See
Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 274.
* Castrin, ' Finn. Myth.' pp. 162, 221, 230 ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 170.
156 ANIMISM.
were stolen out of his tent. He complained, and the
Kutuchtu Lama ordered the proper steps to be taken to find
out the thief. One of the Lamas took a bench with four
feet, and after turning it several times in different directions,
at last it pointed directly to the tent where the stolen goods
lay concealed. The Lama now mounted astride the bench,
and soon carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried
him, to the very tent, where he ordered the damask to be
produced. The demand was directly complied with : for it
is vain in such cases to offer any excuse. 1
A more recent account from Central Africa may be placed
as a pendant to this Asiatic account of divination by a fetish-
object. The Rev. H. Rowley says of the Manganja, that
they believed the medicine-men could impart a power for
good or evil to objects either animate or inanimate, which
objects the people feared,though they did not worship them.
This missionary once saw this art employed to detect the
thief who had stolen some corn. The people assembled
round a large fig-tree. The magician, a wild-looking man,
produced two sticks, like our broomsticks, which after
mysterious manipulation and gibberish he delivered to four
young men, two holding each stick. A zebra-tail and a
calabash-rattle were given to a young man and a boy. The
medicine-man rolled himself about in hideous fashion, and
chanted an unceasing incantation ; the bearers of the tail
and rattle went round the stick-holders, and shook these
implements over their heads. After a while the men with
the sticks had spasmodic twitchings of the arms and legs,
these increased nearly to convulsions, they foamed at the
mouth, their eyes seemed starting from their heads, they
realized to the full the idea of demoniacal possession.
According to the native notion, it was the sticks which were
possessed primarily, and through them the men, who could
hardly hold them. The sticks whirled and dragged the men
round and round like mad, through bush and thorny shrub,
and over every obstacle, nothing stopped them, their bodies
1 Bell, in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 357.
FETISHISM. 157
were torn and bleeding ; at last they came back to the
assembly, whirled round again, and rushed down the path
to fall panting and exhausted in the hut of one of a chief's
wives, the sticks rolling to her very feet, denouncing her as
the thief. She denied it, but the medicine-man answered,
' The spirit has declared her guilty, the spirit never lies.'
However, the ' muavi ' or ordeal-poison was administered
to a cock, as deputy for the woman ; the bird threw it up,
and she was acquitted. 1
Fetishism in the lower civilization is thus by no means
confined to the West African negro with whom we specially
associate the term. Yet, what with its being in fact ex-
tremely prevalent there, and what with the attention of
foreign observers having been particularly drawn to it, the
accounts from West Africa are certainly the fullest and
most minute on record. The late Professor Waitz's
generalization of the principle involved in these is much to
the purpose. He thus describes the negro's conception
of his fetish. ' According to his view, a spirit dwells or can
dwell in every sensible object, and often a very great and
mighty one in an insignificant thing. This spirit he does
not consider as bound fast and unchangeably to the corporeal
thing it dwells in, but it has only its usual or principal
abode in it. The negro indeed in his conception not un-
commonly separates the spirit from the sensible object
which it inhabits, he even sometimes contrasts the one with
the other, but most usually combines the two as forming a
whole, and this whole is (as the Europeans call it) the
" fetish," the object of his religious worship.' Some fur-
ther particulars will show how this principle is worked out.
Fetishes (native names for them are ' grigri,' ' juju,'
&c.) may be mere curious mysterious objects that strike a
negro's fancy, or they may be consecrated or affected by
a priest or fetish-man ; the theory of their influence is that
they belong to or are made effectual by a spirit or demon
yet they have to stand the test of experience, and if they
1 H. Rowley, ' Universities' Mission to Central Africa,' p. 217.
158 ANIMISM.
fail to bring their owner luck and safety, he discards them
for some more powerful medium. The fetish can see and
hear and understand and act, its possessor worships it,
talks familiarly with it as a dear and faithful friend, pours
libations of rum over it, and in times of danger calls loudly
and earnestly on it as if to wake up its spirit and energy.
To give an idea of the sort of things which are chosen as
fetishes, and of the manner in which they are associated
with spiritual influences, Romer's account from Guinea
about a century ago may serve. In the fetish-house, he
says, there hang or lie thousands of rubbishy trifles, a pot
with red earth and a cock's feather stuck in it, pegs wound
over with yarn, red parrots' feathers, men's hair, and so
forth. The principal thing in the hut is the stool for the
fetish to sit on, and the mattress for him to rest on, the
mattress being no bigger than a man's hand and the stool
in proportion, and there is a little bottle of brandy always
ready for him. Here the word fetish is used as it often is,
to denote the spirit which dwells in this rudimentary temple,
but we see that the innumerable quaint trifles which we call
fetishes were associated with the deity in his house. Romer
once peeped in at an open door, and found an old negro
caboceer sitting amid twenty thousand fetishes in his private
fetish-museum, thus performing his devotions. The old
man told him he did not know the hundredth part of the
use they had been to him ; his ancestors and he had col-
lected them, each had done some service. The visitor took
up a stone about as big as a hen's egg, and its owner told
its history. He was once going out on important business,
but crossing the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt
himself. Ha ha ! thought he, art thou here ? So he took
the stone, and it helped him through his undertaking for
days. In our own time, West Africa is still a world of
fetishes. The traveller finds them on every path, at every
ford, on every house-door, they hang as amulets round
every man's neck, they guard against sickness or inflict it
if neglected, they bring rain, they fill the sea with fishes
FETISHISM. 159
willing to swim into the fisherman's net, they catch and
punish thieves, they give their owner a bold heart and con-
found his enemies, there is nothing that the fetish cannot
do or undo, if it be but the right fetish. Thus the one-
sided logic of the barbarian, making the most of all that fits
and glossing over all that fails, has shaped a universal
fetish-philosophy of the events of life. So strong is the
pervading influence, that the European in Africa is apt to
catch it from the negro, and himself, as the saying is,
' become black.' Thus even yet some traveller, watching
a white companion asleep, may catch a glimpse of some
claw or bone or such-like sorcerer's trash secretly fastened
round his neck. 1
European life, lastly, shows well-marked traces of the
ancient doctrine of spirits or mysterious influences inhabit-
ing objects. Thus a mediaeval devil might go into an old
sow, a straw, a barleycorn, or a willow-tree. A spirit might
be carried about in a solid receptacle for use :
' Besides in glistering glasses fayre, or else in christall cleare,
They sprightes enclose.'
Modern peasant folklore knows that spirits must have some
animal body or other object to dwell in, a feather, a bag, a
bush, for instance. The Tyrolese object to using grass for
toothpicks because of the demons that may have taken up
their abode in the straws. The Bulgarians hold it a great
sin not to fumigate the flour when it is brought from the
mill (particularly if the mill be kept by a Turk) in order to
prevent the devil from entering into it. 2 Amulets are still
carried in the most civilized countries of the world, by the
1 Waitz, ' Anthropologie," vol. ii. p. 174 ; Romer, ' Guinea,' p. 56, &c. ;
J. L. Wilson, 'West Africa,' pp. 135, 211-6, 275, 338; Burton, 'Wit and
Wisdom from W. Afr.' pp. 174, 455 ; Steinhauser, 'I.e. p. 134; Bosman,
' Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 397 , Meiners, ' Gesch. der Relig.' vol. i.
p. 173. See also' Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 396; Flacourt, ' Madag.'
p. 191.
1 Brand, ' Popular Antiquities,' vol. iii. p. 255, &c. Bastian, ' Psychologic,'
p. 171. Wuttke, ' Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' pp. 75-95, 225, &c. St. Clair
and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 46.
l6o ANIMISM.
ignorant and superstitious with real savage faith in their
mysterious virtues, by the more enlightened in quaint sur-
vival from the past. The mental and physical phenomena
of what is now called ' table-turning ' belong to a class of
proceedings which have here been shown to be familiar to
the lower races, and accounted for by them on a theory of
extra-human influence which is in the most extreme sense
spiritualistic.
In giving its place in the history of mental development
to the doctrine of the lower races as to embodiment in or
penetration of an object by a spirit or an influence, there is
no slight interest in comparing it with theories familiar to
the philosophy of cultured nations. Thus Bishop Berkeley
remarks on the obscure expressions of those who have de-
scribed the relation of power to the objects which exert it.
He cites Torricelli as likening matter to an enchanted vase
of Circe serving as a receptacle of force, and declaring that
power and impulse are such subtle abstracts and refined
quintessences, that they cannot be enclosed in any other
vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids ; also
Leibnitz as comparing active primitive power to soul or
substantial form. Thus, says Berkeley, must even the
greatest men, when they give way to abstraction, have re-
course to words having no certain signification, and indeed
mere scholastic shadows. 1 We may fairly add that such
passages show the civilized metaphysician falling back on
such primitive conceptions as still occupy the minds of the
rude natives of Siberia and Guinea. To go yet farther, I
will venture to assert that the scientific conceptions current
in my own schoolboy days, of heat and electricity as in-
visible fluids passing in and out of solid bodies, are ideas
which reproduce with extreme closeness the special doctrine
of Fetishism.
Under the general heading of Fetishism, but for con-
venience' sake separately, may be considered the worship of
' stocks and stones.' Such objects, if merely used as
1 Berkeley, ' Concerning Motion,' in ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 86.
STOCK-AND-STONE WORSHIP. l6l
altars, are not of the nature of fetishes, and it is first
necessary to ascertain that worship is actually addressed
to them. Then arises the difficult question, are the stocks
and stones set up as mere ideal representatives of deities,
or are these deities considered as physically connected with
them, embodied in them, hovering about them, acting
through them ? In other words, are they only symbols, or
have they passed in the minds of their votaries into real
fetishes ? The conceptions of the worshippers are sometimes
in this respect explicitly stated, may sometimes be fairly
inferred Irom the circumstances, and are often doubtful.
Among the lower races of America, the Dacotas would
pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it
as grandfather, make offerings to it and pray to it to deliver
them from danger; 1 in the West India Islands, mention is
made of three stones to which the natives paid great devo-
tion one was piofitable for the crops, another for women
to be delivered without pain, the third for sunshine and
rain when they were wanted ; ' and we hear of Brazilian
tribes setting up stakes in the ground, and making offerings
before them to appease their deities or demons.' Stone-
worship held an important place in the midst of the com-
paratively high culture of Peru, where not only was rever-
ence given to especial curious pebbles and the like, but
stones were placed to represent the penates of households
and the patron-deities of villages. It is related by Monte-
sinos that when the worship of a certain sacred stone was
given up, a parrot flew from it into another stone, to which
adoration was paid : and though this author is not of good
credit, he can hardly have invented a story which, as we
shall see, so curiously coincides with the Polynesian idea of
a bird conveying to and from an idol the spirit which em-
bodies itself in it. 4
1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part ii. p. 196, part iii. p. 229.
1 Hcrrcra, ' Indias Occidentales,' dec. i. iii. 3.
* De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.
4 Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Commentaries Reales," i. 9 ; J. G. Miiller, pp. 263,
311,371,387; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 454 ; see below, p. 175.
l62 ANIMISM.
In Africa, stock-and-stone worship is found among the
Damaras of the South, whose ancestors are represented at
the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes con-
secrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first offered ; l
among the Dinkas of the White Nile, where the missionaries
saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food
and drink before a short thick staff planted in the ground,
that the demon might not hurt her ; * among the Gallas of
Abyssinia, a people with a well-marked doctrine of deities,
and who are known to worship stones and logs, but not
idols. 8 In the island of Sambawa, the Orang Dongo attri-
bute all supernatural or incomprehensible force to the sun,
moon, trees, &c.,but especially to stones, and whan troubled
by accident or disease, they carry offerings to certain stones
to implore the favour of their genius or devva. 4 Similar
ideas are to be traced through the Pacific islands, both
among the lighter and the darker races. Thus in the
Society Islands, rude logs or fragments of basalt columns,
clothed in native cloth and anointed with oil, received
adoration and sacrifice as divinely powerful by virtue of the
atua or deity which had filled them. 5 So in the New
Hebrides worship was given to water-worn pebbles, 6 while
Fijian gods and goddesses had their abodes or shrines in
black stones like smooth round milestones, and there re-
ceived their offerings of food. 7 The curiously anthropo-
morphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even
having children, is familiar to the Fijians as it is to the
Peruvians and the Lapps.
The Turanian tribes of North Asia display stock-and-
stone worship in full sense and vigour. Not only were
Hahn, ' Gramm. des Herer6,' s.v. ' omu-makisina.'
Kaufmann, ' Central- Afrika,' (White Nile), p. 131.
Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 518, 5*3.
Zollinger in ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 692.
Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 337. See also Ellis, ' Madagascar,' vol. i.
399-
Turner, ' Polynesia,' pp. 347, 526.
Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i. p. 220 ; Seemann, ' Viti,' pp. 66, 89.
STOCK-AND-STONE WORSHIP. 163
stones, especially curious ones and such as were like men
or animals, objects of veneration, but we learn that they
were venerated because mighty spirits dwelt in them. The
Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, with its two deities, one
with a stone head, the other a mere black stone, both
dressed in green robes with red lappets, and both smeared
with sacrificial blood, may serve as a type of stone-worship.
And as for the Ostyaks, had the famous King Log presented
himself among them, they would without more ado have
wrapped his sacred person in rags, and set him up for
worship on a mountain-top or in the forest. 1 The frequent
stock-and-stone worship of modern India belongs especially
to races non-Hindu or part-Hindu in race and culture.
Among such may serve as examples the bamboo which
stands for the Bodo goddess Mainou, and for her receives
the annual hog, and the monthly eggs offered by the women ; 8
the stone under the great cotton-tree of every Khond village,
shrine of Nadzu Pennu the village deity; 8 the clod or stone
under a tree, which in Behar will represent the deified soul
of some dead personage who receives worship and inspires
oracles there ; 4 the stone kept in every house by the Baka-
dara and Betadara, which represents their god Buta, whom
they induce by sacrifice to restrain the demon-souls of the
dead from troubling them ; 5 the two rude stones placed
under a shed among the Shanars of Tinnevelly, by the
medium of which the great god and goddess receive sacri-
fice, but which are thrown away or neglected when done
with. 6 , The remarkable groups of standing-stones in India
are, in many cases at least, set up for each stone to represent
1 Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 193, &c., 204, &c. ; ' Voyages au Nord,' vol.
viii. pp. 103, 410 ; Klemm, ' C. G.' vol. iii. p. 120. See also Steller,
' Kamtschatka,' pp. 265, 276.
* Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' p. 174. See also Macrae in ' As. Res.' vol.
vii. p. 196 ; Dalton, ' Kols,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 33.
8 Macpherson, 'India,' pp. 103, 358.
4 Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 177. See also Shortt, ' Tribes of Neil-
gherries,' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 281.
8 Elliot in ' Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. 1869, p. 115.
Buchanan, ' Mysore,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 739.
164 ANIMISM.
or embody a deity. Mr. Hislop remarks that in every part
of Southern India, four or five stones may often be seen in
the ryot's field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint,
which they consider as guardians of the field and call the
five Pandus ; he reasonably takes these Hindu names to
have superseded more ancient native appellations. In the
Indian groups it is a usual practice to daub each stone with
red paint, forming as it were a great blood-spot where the
face would be if it were a shaped idol. 1 In India, moreover,
the rites of stone-worship are not unexampled among the
Hindus proper. Shashti, protectress of children, receives
worship, vows, and offerings, especially from women ; yet
they provide her with no idol or temple, but her proper
representative is a rough stone as big as a man's head,
smeared with red paint and set at the foot of the sacred
vata-tree. Even Siva is worshipped as a stone, especially
that Siva who will afflict a child with epileptic fits, and then,
speaking by its voice, will announce that he is Panchanana
the Five-faced, and is punishing the child for insulting his
image ; to this Siva, in the form of a clay idol or of a stone
beneath a sacred tree, there are offered not only flowers and
fruits, but also bloody sacrifices. 1
This stone-worship among the Hindus seems a survival
of a rite belonging originally to a low civilization, probably
a rite of the rude indigenes of the land, whose religion,
largely incorporated into the religion of the Aryan invaders,
has contributed so much to form the Hinduism of to-day.
It is especially interesting to survey the stock-and-stone
worship of the lower culture, for it enables us to explain by
the theory of survival the appearance in the Old World, in
the very midst of classic doctrine and classic art, of the
1 Elliot in ' Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. pp. 96, 115, 125. Lubbock, ' Origin
of Civilization,' p. 222. Forbes Leslie, ' Early Races of Scotland,' vol. ii.
p. 462, &c. Prof. Liebrecht, in 'Ztschr. fur Ethnologic,' vol. v. p. 100,
compares the field-protecting Priapos-hermrs of ancient Italy, daubed with
minium.
* Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. pp. 142, 182, &c.. see 221. See also Latham, 'Descr.
Eth.' vol. ii. p. 239. (Siah-push, stone offered to the representative of deity.)
STONE-WORSHIP. 165
worship of the same rude objects, whose veneration no
doubt dated from remote barbaric antiquity. As Mr. Grote
says, speaking of Greek worship, ' The primitive memorial
erected to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but
was often nothing more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless
stone or a post, receiving care and decoration from the
neighbourhood, as well as worship.' Such were the log
that stood for Artemis in Eubcea, the stake that repre-
sented Pallas Athene, ' sine effigie rudis palus, et informe
lignum,' the unwrought stone (Ai0os a/oyo's) at Hyettos
which ' after the ancient manner ' represented Herakles,
the thirty such stones which the Pharaeans in like archaic
fashion worshipped for the gods, and that one which re-
ceived such honour in Boeotian festivals as representing
the Thespian Eros. Theophrastus, in the 4th century B.C.,
depicts the superstitious Greek passing the anointed stones
in the streets, taking out his phial and pouring oil on them,
falling on his knees to adore, and going his way. Six cen-
turies later, Arnobius could describe from his own heathen
life the state of mind of the stock-and-stone worshipper,
telling how when he saw one of the stones anointed with
oil, he accosted it in nattering vords, and asked benefits
from the senseless thing as though it contained a present
power. 1 The ancient and graphic passage in the book of
Isaiah well marks stone-worship within the range of the
Semitic race :
' Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion :
They, they are thy lot :
Even to them hast thou poured a drink-offering,
Hast thou offered a meat-offering.' *
Long afterwards, among the local deities which Mohammed
1 Grote, ' Hist, of Greece,' vol. iv. p. 132 ; Welcker, ' Griechische Gotter-
lehre,' vol. i. p. 220. Meiners, vol. i. p. 1 50, &c. Details esp. in Pausanias ;
Theophrast. Charact. xvi. ; Tacit. Hist. ii. 3 ; Arnobius, Adv. Gent. ; Ter-
tullianus ; Clemens Alexandr.
2 Is. Ivii. 6. The first line, ' behhalkey-nahhal hhe'lkech,' turns on the
pun on hhlk= smooth (stone), and also lot or portion ; a double sense prob-
ably connected with the use of smooth pebbles for casting lots.
l66 ANIMISM.
found in Arabia, and which Dr. Sprenger thinks he even
acknowledged as divine during a moment when he well-nigh
broke down in his career, were Manah and Lat, the one a
rock, the other a stone or a stone idol ; while the veneration
of the black stone of the Kaaba, which Captain Burton
thinks an aerolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the
Prophet transplanted into his new religion, where it
flourishes to this day. 1 The curious passage in Sanchonia-
thon which speaks of the Heaven-god forming the ' baetyls,
animated stones ' ($os Oupavos BatruXia, A.i$ovs ffj,\f/vxov<s t
firjxavTio-a-pfvos) perhaps refers to meteorites or supposed
thunderbolts fallen from the clouds. To the old Phoenician
religion, which made so deep a contact with the Jewish world
on the one side and the Greek and Roman on the other,
there belonged the stone pillars of Baal and the wooden
ashera-posts, but how far these objects were of the character
of altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle. 2 We may still
say with Tacitus, describing the conical pillar which stood
instead of an image to represent the Paphian Venus ' et
ratio in obscuro.'
There are accounts of formal Christian prohibitions of
stone-worship in France and England, reaching on into the
early middle ages, 8 which show this barbaric cultus as then
distinctly lingering in popular religion. Coupling this fact
with the accounts of the groups of standing-stones set up to
represent deities in South India, a corresponding explan-
ation has been suggested in Europe. Are the menhirs,
cromlechs, &c., idols, and circles and lines of idols, wor-
shipped by remotely ancient dwellers in the land as repre-
sentatives or embodiments of their gods ? The question at
least deserves consideration, although the ideas with which
1 Sprenger, ' Mohammad,' vol. ii. p. 7, &c. Burton, ' El Medinah,' &c.,
vol. ii. p. 157.
1 Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10. Deut. xii. 3 ; Micah v. 13, &c. Movers,
' Phonizier,' vol. i. pp. 105, 569, and see index, ' Saule,' &c. See De Brasses,
' Dieux Fetiches,' p. 135 (considers baetyl=beth-el, &c.).
1 For references see Ducange s.v. ' petra ' ; Leslie, ' Early Races of Scot-
land,' vol. i. p. 256.
STONE-WORSHIP. 167
stone- worship is carried on by different races are multi-
farious, and the analogy may be misleading. It is remark-
able to what late times full and genuine stone-worship has
survived in Europe. In certain mountain districts of
Norway, up to the end of the last century, the peasants
used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday
evening (which seems to show some connection with Thor),
smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the
seat of honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the
year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and
comfort to the house. 1 In an account dating from 1851,
the islanders of Inniskea, off Mayo, are declared to have a
stone carefully wrapped in flannel, which is brought out
and worshipped at certain periods, and when a storm arises
it is supplicated to send a wreck on the coast. 2 No savage
ever showed more clearly by his treatment of a fetish that
he considered it a personal being, than did these Nor-
wegians and Irishmen. The ethnographic argument from
the existence of stock-and-stone worship among so many
nations of comparatively high culture seems to me of great
weight as bearing on religious development among mankind.
To imagine that peoples skilled in carving wood and stone,
and using these arts habitually in making idols, should
have gone out of their way to invent a practice of worship-
ping logs and pebbles, is not a likely theory. But on the
other hand, when it is considered how such a rude object
serves to uncultured men as a divine image or receptacle,
there is nothing strange in its being a relic of early bar-
barism holding its place against more artistic models
through ages of advancing civilization, by virtue of the
traditional sanctity which belongs to survival from remote
antiquity.
1 Nilsson, ' Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' p. 241. See also
Meiners, vol. ii. p. 671 (speaking stones in Norway, &c.).
1 Earl of Roden, 'Progress of Reformation in Ireland,' London, 1851,
p. 51. Sir J. E. Tennent in ' Notes and Queries,' Feb. 7, 1852. See Borlase,
1 Antiquities of Cornwall,' Oxford, 1754, book iii. ch. 2.
l68 ANIMISM.
By a scarcely perceptible transition, we pass to Idolatry.
A few chips or scratches or daubs of paint suffice to convert
the rude post or stone into an idol. Difficulties which com-
plicate the study of stock-and-stone worship disappear in
the worship of even the rudest of unequivocal images, which
can no longer be mere altars, and if symbols must at least
be symbols of a personal being. Idolatry occupies a re-
markable district in the history of religion. It hardly
belongs to the lowest savagery, which jsimply seems not to
have attained to it, and it hardly belongs to the highest
civilization, which has discarded it. Its place is inter-
mediate, ranging from the higher savagery where it first
clearly appears, to the middle civilization where it reaches
its extreme development, and thenceforward its continuance
is in dwindling survival and sometimes expanding revival.
The position thus outlined is, however, very difficult to map
exactly. Idolatry does not seem to come in uniformly among
the higher savages ; it belongs, for instance, fully to the
Society Islanders, but not to the Tongans and Fijians.
Among higher nations, its presence or absence does not
necessarily agree with particular national affinities or levels
of culture compare the idol-worshipping Hindu with his
ethnic kinsman the idol-hating Parsi, or the idolatrous
Phoenician with his ethnic kinsman the Israelite, among
whose people the incidental relapse into the proscribed
image-worship was a memory of disgrace. Moreover, its
tendency to revive is ethnographically embarrassing. The
ancient Vedic religion seems not to recognize idolatry, yet
the modern Brahmans, professed followers of Vedic doc-
trine, are among the greatest idolaters of the world. Early
Christianity by no means abrogated the Jewish law against
image-worship, yet image-worship became and still remains
widely spread and deeply rooted in Christendom.
Of Idolatry, so far as its nature is symbolic or representa-
tive, I have given some account elsewhere. 1 The old and
1 ' Early Hist, of Mankind,' chap. vi.
IMAGE-WORSHIP. 169
greatest difficulty in investigating the general subject is
this, that an image may be, even to two votaries kneeling
side by side before it, two utterly different things ; to the
one it may be only a symbol, a portrait, a memento ; while
to the other it is an intelligent and active being, by virtue
of a life or spirit dwelling in it or acting through it. In
both cases Image-worship is connected with the belief in
spiritual beings, and is in fact a subordinate development
of animism. But it is only so far as the image approxi-
mates to the nature of a material body provided for a spirit,
that Idolatry comes properly into connexion with Fetishism.
It is from this point of view that it is proposed to examine
here its purpose and its place in history. An idol, so far as
it belongs to the theory .of spirit-embodiment, must combine
the characters of portrait and fetish. Bearing this in mind,
and noticing how far the idol is looked on as in some way
itself an energetic object, or as the very receptacle enshrin-
ing a spiritual god, let us proceed to judge how far, along
the course of civilization, the idea of the image itself exert-
ing power or being personally animate has prevailed in the
mind of the idolater.
As to the actual origin of idolatry, it need not be
supposed that the earliest idols made by man seemed to
their maker living or even active things. It is quite likely
that the primary intention of the image was simply to
serve as a sign or representative of some soul or deity, and
certainly this original character is more or less maintained
in the world through the long history of image-worship.
At a stage succeeding this original condition, it may be
argued, the tendency to identify the symbol and the
symbolized, a tendency so strong among children and the
ignorant everywhere, led to the idol being treated as a
living powerful being, and thence even to explicit doctrines
as to the manner of its energy .or animation. It is, then,
in this secondary stage, where the once merely repre-
sentative image is passing into the active image-fetish,
that we are particularly concerned to understand it.
170 ANIMISM.
Here it is reasonable to judge the idolater by his distinct
actions and beliefs. A line of illustrative examples will
carry the personality of the idol through grade after
grade of civilization. Among the lower races, such
thoughts are displayed by the Kurile islander throwing
his idol into the sea to calm the storm ; by the negro who
feeds ancestral images and brings them a share of his
trade profits, but will beat an idol or fling it into the fire if
it cannot give him luck or preserve him from sickness ; by
famous idols of Madagascar, of which one goes about of
himself or guides his bearers, and another answers when
spoken to at least, they did this till they were ignominiously
found out a few years ago. Among Tatar peoples of North
Asia and Europe, conceptions of this class are illustrated
by the Ostyak, who clothes his puppet and feeds it with
broth, but if it brings him no sport will try the effect of a
good thrashing on it, after which he will clothe and feed it
again ; by the Lapps, who fancied their uncouth images
could go about at will ; or the Esths, who wondered that
their idols did not bleed when Dieterich the Christian priest
hewed them down. Among high Asiatic nations, what
could be more anthropomorphic than the rites of modern
Hinduism, the dances of the nautch-girls before the idols,
the taking out of Jagannath in procession to pay visits, the
spinning of tops before Krishna to amuse him ? Buddhism
is a religion in its principles little favourable to idolatry.
Yet, from setting up portrait-statues of Gautama and other
saints, there developed itself the full worship of images, and
even of images with hidden joints and cavities, which moved
and spoke as in our own middle ages. In China, we read
stories of worshippers abusing some idol that has failed in
its duty. ' How now,' they say, ' you dog of a spirit ; we
have given you an abode in a splendid temple, we gild you
and feed you and fumigate you with incense, and yet you
are so ungrateful that you won't listen to our prayers ! ' So
they drag him in the dirt, and then, if they get what they
want, it is but to clean him and set him up again, with
IDOLATRY. 171
apologies and promises of a new coat of gilding. There is
what appears a genuine story of a Chinaman who had paid
an idol priest to cure his daughter, but she died ; whereupon
the swindled worshipper brought an action at law against
the god, who for his fraud was banished from the province.
The classic instances, again, are perfect the dressing and
anointing of statues, feeding them with delicacies and divert-
ing them with raree-shows, summoning them as witnesses ;
the story of the Arkadian youths coming back from a bad
day's hunting and revenging themselves by scourging and
pricking Pan's statue, and the companion tale of the image
which fell upon the man who ill-treated it ; the Tyrians
chaining the statue of the Sun-god that he might not
abandon their city ; Augustus chastising in effigy the ill-
behaved Neptune ; Apollo's statue that moved when it
would give an oracle ; and the rest of the images which
brandished weapons, or wept, or sweated, to prove their
supernatural powers. Such ideas continued to hold their
place in Christendom, as was natural, considering how
directly the holy image or picture took the place of the
household god or the mightier idol of the temple. The
Russian boor covering up the saint's picture that it may
not see him do wrong ; the Mingrelian borrowing a suc-
cessful neighbour's saint when his own crop fails, or when
about to perjure himself choosing for the witness of his
deceitful oath a saint of mild countenance and merciful
repute ; the peasant of Southern Europe, alternately coax-
ing and trampling on his special saint-fetish, and ducking
the Virgin or St. Peter for rain ; the winking and weeping
images that are worked, even at this day, to the greater
glory of God, or rather to the greater shame of Man
these are but the extreme instances of the worshipper's
endowment of the sacred image with a life and personality
modelled on his own. 1
1 For general collections of evidence, see especially Meiners, ' Geschichte
der Religionen,' vol. i. books i. and v. ; Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. ; Waitz,
4 Anthropologiej ' De Drosses, 4 Dieux Fe'tiches,' &c. Particular details in
172 ANIMISM.
The appearance of idolatry at a grade above the lowest
of known human culture, and its development in extent
and elaborateness under higher conditions of civilization,
are well displayed among the native races of America.
' Conspicuous by its absence ' among many of the lower
tribes, image-worship comes plainly into view toward the
upper levels of savagery, as where, for instance, Brazilian
native tribes set up in their huts, or in the recesses of
the forest, their pygmy heaven-descended figures of wax
or wood; 1 or where the Mandans, howling and whining,
made their prayers before puppets of grass and skins ; or
where the spiritual beings of the Algonquins (manitu) or
the Hurons (oki) were represented by, and in language
identified with, the carved wooden heads or more complete
images to which worship and sacrifice were offered. Among
the Virginians and other of the more cultured Southern
tribes, these idols even had temples to dwell in. 8 The
discoverers of the New World found idolatry an accepted
institution among the islanders of the West Indies.
These strong animists are recorded to have carved their
little images in the shapes in which they believed the
spirits themselves to have appeared to them ; and some
human figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of
them. The images of such ' cemi ' or spirits, some animal,
but most of human type, were found by thousands ; and
it is even declared that an island near Hayti had a
population of idol-makers, who especially made images of
nocturnal spectres. The spirit could be conveyed with
the image, both were called ' cemi,' and in the local ac-
counts of sacrifices, oracles, and miracles, the deity and
the idol are mixed together in a way which at least shows
the extreme closeness of their connexion in the native
J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' p. 393; Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 395; Castrln,
' Finnische Mythologie,' p. 193, &c. ; Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. ; Koppen,
' Rel. des Buddha,' vol. i. p. 493, &c. ; Grote, ' Hist, of Greece.'
1 J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrelig.''p/263 ; Meiners, vol i..p, 163.
* Loskiel, ' Ind. of N. A.' vol. i. p; 39. Smith, ' Virginia,' in Pinkerton,
vol. xiii. p. 14. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 203 ; J. G. Miiller, pp.. 95-8, 128.
IDOLATRY. 173
mind. 1 If we pass to the far higher culture of Peru, we
find idols in full reverence, some of them complete figures,
but the great deities of Sun and Moon figured by discs with
human countenances, like those which to this day represent
them in symbol among ourselves. As for the conquered
neighbouring tribes brought under the dominion of the
Incas, their idols were carried, half trophies and half hos-
tages, to Cuzco, to rank- among the inferior deities of the
Peruvian Pantheon. 2 In Mexico, idolatry had attained to its
full barbaric development. As in the Aztec mind the world
swarmed with spiritual deities, so their material representa-
tives, the idols, stood in the houses at the corners of the
streets, on every hill and rock, to receive from passers-by some
little offering a nosegay, a whiff of incense, a drop or two of
blood ; while in the temples more huge and elaborate images
enjoyed the dances and processions in their honour, were
fed by the bloody sacrifice of men and beasts, and received
the tribute and reverence paid to the great national gods. 8
Up to a certain point, such evidence bears upon the present
question. We learn that the native races of the New World
had idols, that those idols in some sort represented ances-
tral souls and other deities, and for them received adora-
tion and sacrifice. But whether the native ideas of the
connexion of spirit and image were obscure, or whether the
foreign observers did not get at these ideas, or partly for
both reasons, there is a general want of express statement
how far the idols of America remained mere symbols or
portraits, or how far they had come to be considered the
animated bodies of the gods.
It is not always thus, however. In the island regions of
1 Fernando Colombo, ' Vita del Amm. Cristoforo Colombo,' Venice, 1571,
p. 127, &c. ; and ' Life of Colon,' in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84. Herrera,
dec. i. iii. 3. Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' pp. 421-4. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 384 ;
J. G. Miiller, pp. 171-6, 182, 210, 232.
* Prescott, ' Peru,' vol. i. pp. 71, 89 ; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 458 ; J. G. Muller,
pp. 322, 371.
8 Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 486 ; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 148 ; J. G.
Muller, p. 642.
174 ANIMISM.
the Southern Hemisphere, while image-worship scarcely
appears among the Andaman islanders, Tasmanians, or
Australians, and is absent or rare in various Papuan and
Polynesian districts, it prevails among the majority of the
island tribes who have attained to middle and high savage
levels. In Polynesian islands, where the meaning of the
native idolatry has been carefully examined, it is found to
rest on the most absolute theory of spirit-embodiment.
Thus, New-Zealanders set up memorial idols of deceased
persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them
as if still alive, and casting garments to them when they
passed by, also they preserve in their houses small carved
wooden images, each dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor.
It is distinctly held that such an atua or ancestral deity
enters into the substance of an image in order to hold con-
verse with the living. A priest can by repeating charms
cause the spirit to enter into the idol, which he will even jerk
by a string round its neck to arrest its attention ; it is the
same atua or spirit which will at times enter not the image
but the priest himself, throw him into convulsions, and de-
liver oracles through him ; while it is quite understood that
the images themselves are not objects of worship, nor do
they possess in themselves any virtue, but derive their
sacredness from being the temporary abodes of spirits. 1
In the Society Islands, it was noticed in Captain Cook's ex-
ploration that the carved wooden images at burial-places
were not considered mere memorials, but abodes into which
the souls of the departed retired. In Mr. Ellis 's account
of the Polynesian idolatry, relating as it seems especially to
this group, the sacred objects might be either mere stocks
and stones, or carved wooden images, from six or eight feet
long down to as many inches. Some of these were to re-
present ' tii,' divine manes or spirits of the dead, while
others were to represent ' tu,' or deities of higher rank
and power. At certain seasons, or in answer to the prayers
of the priests, these spiritual beings entered into the idols,
1 Shortland, ' Trads. of N. Z.* &c., p. 83 ; Taylor, pp. 171, 183, 212.
IDOLATRY. 175
Which then became very powerful, but when the spirit de-
parted, the idol remained only a sacred object. A god
often came to and passed from an image in the body of a
bird, and spiritual influence could be transmitted from an
idol by imparting it by contact to certain valued kinds of
feathers, which could be carried away in this ' inhabited '
state, and thus exert power elsewhere, and transfer it to
new idols. Here then we have the similarity of souls to
other spirits shown by the similar way in which both be-
come embodied in images, just as these same people con-
sider both to enter into human bodies. And we have the
pure fetish, which here is a feather or a log or stone, brought
together with the more elaborate carved idol, all under one
common principle of spirit-embodiment. 1 In Borneo, not-
withstanding the Moslem prohibition of idolatry, not only
do images remain in use, but the doctrine of spirit-embodi-
ment is distinctly applied to them. Among the tribes of
Western Sarawak the priestesses have made for them rude
figures of birds, which none but they may touch. These
are supposed to become inhabited by spirits, and at the
great harvest feasts are hung up in bunches of ten or twenty
in the long common room, carefully veiled with coloured
handkerchiefs. Again, among some Dayak tribes, they will
make rude figures of a naked man and woman, and place
these opposite to one another on the path to the farms. On
their heads are head-dresses of bark, by their sides is the
betel-nut basket, and in their hands a short wooden spear.
These figures are said to be inhabited each by a spirit who
prevents inimical influences from passing on to the farms,
and likewise from the farms to the village, and evil betide
the profane wretch who lifts his hand against them violent
fever and sickness would be sure to follow.*
West Africa naturally applies its familiar fetish-doctrine
1 J. R. Forster, ' Obs. during Voyage,' London, 1778, p. 534, &c. ; Ellis,
' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 281, &c., 323, &c. See also Earl, ' Papuans,' p. 84 ;
Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 78 (Nias).
* St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 198.
176 ANIMISM.
of spirit-embodiment to images or idols. How an image
may be considered a receptacle for a spirit, is well shown
here by the straw and rag figures of men and beasts made
in Calabar at the great triennial purification, for the ex-
pelled spirits to take refuge in, whereupon they are got rid
of over the border. 1 As to positive idols, nothing could
be more explicit than the Gold-Coast account of certain
wooden figures called ' amagai,' which are specially
treated by a ' wong-man ' or priest, and have a ' wong '
or deity in connexion with them ; so close is the connexion
conceived between spirit and image, that the idol is itself
called ' wong.' 2 So in the Ewe district, the same ' edro '
or deity who inspires the priest is also present in the idol,
and ' edro ' signifies both god and idol. 3 Waitz sums up
the principles of West African idolatry in a distinct theory
of embodiment, as follows : ' The god himself is invisible,
but the devotional feeling and especially the lively fancy of
the negro demands a visible object to which worship may be
directed. He wishes really and sensibly to behold the god,
and seeks to shape in wood or clay the conception he has
formed of him. Now if the priest, whom the god himself
at times inspires and takes possession of, consecrates this
figure to him, the idea has only to follow that the god may
in consequence be pleased to take up his abode in the
figure, to which he may be specially invited by the conse-
cration, and thus image-worship is seen to be comprehen-
sible enough. Denham found that even to take a man's
portrait was dangerous and caused mistrust, from the fear
that a part of the living man's soul might be conveyed by
magic into the artificial figure. The idols are not, as Bos-
man thinks, deputies of the gods, but merely objects in
which the god loves to place himself, and which at the same
time display him in sensible presence to his adorers. The
1 Hutchinson in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 336 ; see Bastian, ' Psychologic,'
p. 172.
2 Steinhauser, in ' Magaz. der Evang. Missionen,' Basel, 1856, No. 2,
p. 131.
3 Schlegel, ' Ewe-Sprache," p. xvi.
IDOLATRY. 177
god is also by no means bound fast to his dwelling in the
image, he goes out and in, or rather is present in it some-
times with more and sometimes with less intensity.' 1
Castren's wide and careful researches among the rude
Turanian tribes of North Asia led him to form a similar
conception of the origin and nature of their idolatry. The
idols of these people are uncouth objects, often mere stones
or logs with some sort of human countenance, or sometimes
more finished images, even of metal ; some are large, some
mere dolls ; they belong to individuals, or families, or
tribes ; they may be kept in the yurts for private use, or
set up in sacred groves or on the steppes or near the hunt-
ing and fishing places they preside over, or they may even
have special temple-houses ; some open-air gods are left
naked, not to spoil good clothes, but others under cover are
decked out with all an Ostyak's or Samoyed's wealth of
scarlet cloths and costly furs, necklaces and trinkets ; and
lastly, to the idols are made rich offerings of food, clothes,
furs, kettles, pipes, and the rest of the inventory of Siberian
nomade riches. Now these idols are not to be taken as
mere symbols or portraits of deities, but the worshippers
mostly imagine that the deity dwells in the image or, so to
speak, is embodied in it, whereby the idol becomes a real
god capable of giving health and prosperity to man. On
the one hand, the deity becomes serviceable to the wor-
shipper by being thus contained and kept for his use, and
on the other hand, the god profits by receiving richer offer-
ings, failing which it would depart from its receptacle. We
even hear of numerous spirits being contained in one image,
and flying off at the death of the shaman who owned it. In
Buddhist Tibet, as in West Africa, the practice of conjuring
into puppets the demons which molest men is a recognized
rite ; while in Siam the making of clay puppets to be ex-
posed on trees or by the roadside, or set adrift with food-
1 Waitz, ' Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 183; Denham, 'Travels,' vol. i.
p. 113 ; Romer, ' Guinea ' ; Bosnian, ' Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. See
also Livingstone, ' S. Afr.' p. 282 (Balonda).
178 ANIMISM.
offerings in baskets, is a recognized manner of expelling
disease-spirits. 1 In the image-worship of modern India,
there crop up traces of the embodiment-theory. It is pos-
sible for the intelligent Hindu to attach as little real per-
sonality to a divine image, as to the man of straw which he
makes in order to celebrate the funeral rites of a relative
whose body cannot be recovered. He can even protest
against being treated as an idolater at all, declaring the
images of his gods to be but symbols, bringing to his mind
thoughts of the real deities, as a portrait reminds one of a
friend no longer to be seen in the body. Yet in the popular
religion of his country, what could be more in conformity
with the fetish-theory than the practice of making tem-
porary hollow clay idols by tens of thousands, which receive
no veneration for themselves, and only become objects of
worship when the officiating brahman has invited the deity
to dwell in the image, performing the ceremony of the
' adhivasa ' or inhabitation, after which he puts in the eyes
and the ' prana,' i.e., breath, life, or soul.*
Nowhere, perhaps, in the wide history of religion, can
we find definitions more full and absolute of the theory of
deities actually animating their images, than in those pas-
sages from early Christian writers which describe the nature
and operation of the heathen idols. Arnobius introduces
the heathen as declaring that it is not the bronze or gold and
silver material they consider to be gods, but they worship
in them those beings which sacred dedication introduces,
and causes to inhabit the artificial images. 3 Augustine
cites as follows the opinions attributed to Hermes Trisme-
gistus. This Egyptian, he tells us, considers some gods as
made by the highest Deity, and some by men ; ' he asserts
the visible and tangible images to be as it were bodies of
1 Castrdn, ' Finn. Myth,' p. 193, &c. ; Bastian, ' Psych.' p. 34, 208,
4 Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. pp. 293, 486. See ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 350
(Chinese).
* Max Mtiller, ' Chips,' vol. i. p. xvii.; ' Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 198,
vol. ii. pp. xxxv. 164, 234, 292, 485.
3 Arnobius Ad versus Gentes, vi. 17-19.
IDOLATRY. 179
gods, for there are within them certain invited spirits, of
some avail for doing harm or for fulfilling certain desires
of those who pay them divine honours and rites of worship.
By a certain art to connect these invisible spirits with visible
objects of corporeal matter, that such may be as it were
animated bodies, effigies dedicate and subservient to the.
spirits this is what he calls making gods, and men have
received this great and wondrous power.' And further,
this Trismegistus is made to speak of 'statues animated
with sense and full of spirit, doing so great things ; statues
prescient of the future, and predicting it by lots, by priests,
by dreams, and by many other ways.' 1 This idea, as ac-
cepted by the early Christians themselves, with the qualifi-
cation that the spiritual beings inhabiting the idols were not
beneficent deities but devils, is explicitly stated by Minucius
Felix, in a passage in the ' Octavius,' which gives an in-
structive account of the aministic philosophy of Christianity
towards the beginning of the third century : ' Thus these
impure spirits or demons, as shown by the magi, by the
philosophers, and by Plato, are concealed by consecration
in statues and images, and by their afflatus obtain the
authority as of a present deity when at times they inspire
priests, inhabit temples, occasionally animate the filaments
of the entrails, govern the flight of birds, guide the falling
of lots, give oracles enveloped in many falsehoods . . .
also secretly creeping into (men's) bodies as thin spirits,
they feign diseases, terrify minds, distort limbs, in order to
compel men to their worship ; that fattening on the steam
of altars or their offered victims from the flocks, they may
seem to have cured the ailments which they had constrained.
And these are the madmen whom ye see rush forth into
1 Augustinus ' De Civ. Dei,' viii. 23 : 'at ille visibilia et contrectabilia
simulacra, velut corpora deorum esse asserit ; inesse autem his quosdam
spiritus invitatos, &c Hos ergo spiritus invisibiles per artem
quandam visibilibus rebus corporalis materiae copulare, ut sint quasi
animata corpora, illis spiritibus dicata et subdita simulacra, &c. See also
Tertullianus De Spectaculis, xii. : ' In mortuorum autem idolis dxmonia
consistunt, &C.'
l8o ANIMISM.
public places ; and the very priests without the temple thus
go mad, thus rave, thus whirl about. . . . All these
things most of you know, how the very demons confess of
themselves, so often as they are expelled by us from the
patients' bodies with torments of word and fires of prayer.
Saturn himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatsoever
demons ye worship, overcome by pain declare what they
are ; nor surely do they lie concerning their iniquity, above
all when several of you are present. Believe these wit-
nesses, confessing the truth of themselves, that they are
demons. F<3r adjured by the true and only God, they
shudder reluctant in the wretched bodies ; and either they
issue forth at once, or vanish gradually, according as the
faith of the patient aids, or the grace of the curer
favours.' 1
The strangeness with which such words now fall upon
our ears is full of significance. It is one symptom of that
vast quiet change which has come over animistic philosophy
in the modern educated world. Whole orders of spiritual
beings, worshipped in polytheistic religion, and degraded
in early Christendom to real but evil demons, have since
passed from objective to subjective existence, have faded
from the Spiritual into the Ideal. By the operation of
similar intellectual changes, the general theory of spirit-
embodiment, having fulfilled the great work it had for ages
to do in religion and philosophy, has now dwindled within
the limits of the educated world to near its vanishing-point.
The doctrines of Disease-possession and Oracle-possession,
once integral parts of the higher philosophy, and still main-
taining a vigorous existence in the lower culture, seem to
be dying out within the influence of the higher into dog-
matic survival, conscious metaphor, and popular super-
stition. The doctrine of spirit-embodiment in objects,
Fetishism, now scarcely appears outside barbaric regions
1 Marcus Minucius Felix, Octavius, cap. xxvii. : ' Isti igitur impuri
spiritus, darmones, ut ostensum a magis, a philosophis, et a Platone sub
statuis et imaginibus consecrati delitescunt, &c.'
SURVIVAL OF ANIMISTIC TERMS. l8l
save in the peasant folklore which keeps it up amongst us
with so many other remnants of barbaric thought. And
the like theory of spiritual influence as applied to Idolatry,
though still to be studied among savages and barbarians,
and on record in past ages of the civilized world, has per-
ished so utterly amongst ourselves, that few but students
are aware of its ever having existed.
To bring home to our minds the vastness of the intel-
lectual tract which separates modern from savage philo-
sophy, and to enable us to look back along the path where
step by step the mind's journey was made, it will serve us
to glance over the landmarks which language to this day
keeps standing. Our modern languages reach back through
the middle ages to classic and barbaric times, where in this
matter the transition from the crudest primaeval animism is
quite manifest. We keep in daily use, and turn to modern
meaning, old words and idioms which carry us home to the
philosophy of ancient days. We talk of ' genius ' still,
but with thought how changed. The genius of Augustus
was a tutelary demon, to be sworn by and to receive offer-
ings on an altar as a deity. In modern English, Shakspere,
Newton, or Wellington, is said to be led and prompted by
his genius, but that genius is a shrivelled philosophic meta-
phor. So the word ' spirit ' and its kindred terms keep
up with wondrous pertinacity the traces which connect the
thought of the savage with its hereditary successor, the
thought of the philosopher. Barbaric philosophy retains
as real what civilized language has reduced to simile. The
Siamese is made drunk with the demon of the arrack that
possesses the drinker, while we with so different sense still
extract the ' spirit of wine.' 1 Look at the saying ascribed
to Pythagoras, and mentioned by Porphyry. ' The sound
indeed which is given by striking brass, is the voice of a
certain demon contained .in that brass.' These might have
been the representative words of some savage animistic
1 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 455. See Spiegel, ' Avesta,' vol. ii.
p. 54.
l82 ANIMISM.
philosopher ; but with the changed meaning brought by cen-
turies of philosophizing, Oken hit upon a definition almost
identical in form, that ' What sounds, announces its spirit '
(' Was tont, gibt seinen Geist kund ').* What the savage
would have meant, or Porphyry after him did mean, was that
the brass was actually animated by a spirit of the brass apart
from its matter, but when a modern philosopher takes up
the old phrase, all he means is the qualities of the brass.
As in other animistic phrases of thought and feeling such
as ' animal spirits,' or being in ' good and bad spirits,' the
term only recalls with an effort the long-past philosophy
which it once expressed. The modern theory of the
mind considers it capable of performing even exalted and
unusual functions without the intervention of prompting or
exciting demons ; yet the old recognition of such beings
crops up here and there in phrases which adapt animistic
ideas to commonplaces of human disposition, as when a
man is still said to be animated by a patriotic spirit, or
possessed by a spirit of disobedience. In old times the
ryyaorpt/ivtfos, or ' ventriloquus ' was really held to have a
spirit rumbling or talking from inside his body, as when
Eurykles the soothsayer was inspired by such a familiar ;
or when a certain Patriarch mentioning a demon heard to
speak out of a man's belly, remarks on the worthy place it
had chosen to dwell in. In the time of Hippokrates, the
giving of oracular responses by such ventriloquism was
practised by certain women as a profession. To this day
in China one may get an oracular response from a spirit
apparently talking out of a medium's stomach, for a fee of
about twopence-halfpenny. How changed a philosophy it
marks, that among ourselves the word ' ventriloquist '
should have sunk to its present meaning.* Nor is that
1 Porphyr. de Vita Pythagorz. Oken, ' Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,'
* Suidas, s.v. tyyaffrplnvtiot ; Isidor. Gloss, s.v. 'praecantatores'; Bastian,
4 Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 578. Maury, ' Magic,' &c. p. 269. Doolittle, ' Chinese,'
vol. ii. p. 115.
DECLINE OF ANIMISM. 183
change less significant which, starting with the conception
of a man being really v0os, possessed by a deity within
him, carries on a metamorphosed relic of this thorough
animistic thought, from evflowwur/ios to 'enthusiasm.'
With all this, let it not be supposed that such change of
opinion in the educated world has come about through
wanton incredulity or decay of the religious temperament.
Its source is the alteration in natural science, assigning new
causes for the operations of nature and the events of life.
The theory of the immediate action of personal spirits has
here, as so widely elsewhere, given place to ideas of force
and law. No indwelling deity now regulates the life of the
burning sun, no guardian angels drive the stars across the
arching firmament, the divine Ganges is water flowing down
into the sea to evaporate into cloud and descend again in
rain. No deity simmers in the boiling pot, no presiding
spirits dwell in the volcano, no howling demon shrieks from
the mouth of the lunatic. There was a period of human
thought when the whole universe seemed actuated by
spiritual life. For our knowledge of our own history, it
is deeply interesting that there should remain rude races
yet living under the philosophy which we have so far passed
from, since Physics, Chemistry, Biology, have seized whole
provinces of the ancient Animism, setting force for life and
law for will.
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