SCORPION

To give part for the whole is a proceeding so closely con-
formed to ordinary tribute by subject to lord, that in great
measure it comes directly under the gift-theory, and as such
has already had its examples here. It is only when the
part given to the gods is of contemptible value in propor-
tion to the whole, that full sacrifice passes gradually into
substitution. This is the case when in Madagascar the
head- of the sacrificed beast is set up on a pole, and the
blood and fat are rubbed on the stones of the altar, but the
sacrificers and their friends and the officiating priest devour
the whole carcase ; l when rich Guinea negroes sacrifice a
sheep or goat to the fetish, and feast on it with their friends,
only leaving for the deity himself part of the entrails; 2
when Tunguz, sacrificing cattle, would give a bit of liver
and fat and perhaps hang up the hide in the woods as the
god's share, or Mongols would set the heart of the beast
before the idol till next day. 3 Thus the most ancient whole

1 Ellis, ' Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 419.

1 Romer, ' Guinea,' p. 59. Bosnian in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 399.
3 Klcmm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. iii. p. 106 ; Castrin, ' Finn. Myth.'
p. 232.



400 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

burnt-offering of the Greeks dwindled to burning for the
gods only the bones and fat of the slaughtered ox, while the
worshippers feasted themselves on the meat, an economic
rite which takes mythic shape in the legend of the sly
Prometheus giving Zeus the choice of the two parts of the
sacrificed ox he had divided for gods and mortals, on the
one side bones covered seemly with white fat, on the other
the joints hidden under repulsive hide and entrails. 1 With
a different motive, not that of parsimony, but of keeping
up in survival an ancient custom, the Zarathustrian religion
performed by substitution the old Aryan sacrifice by fire.
The Vedic sacrifice Agnishtoma required that animals should
be slain, and their flesh partly committed to the gods by
fire, partly eaten by sacrificers and priests. The Parsi
ceremony Izeshne, formal successor of this bloody rite,
requires no animal to be killed, but it suffices to place the
hair of an ox in a vessel, and show it to the fire. 2

The offering of a part of the worshipper's own body is a
most usual act, whether its intention is simply that of gift
or tribute, or whether it is considered as a pars pro toto
representing the whole man, either in danger and requiring
to be ransomed, or destined to actual sacrifice for another
and requiring to be redeemed. How a finger- joint may thus
represent a whole body, is perfectly shown in the funeral
sacrifices of the Nicobar islanders ; they bury the dead
man's property with him, and his wife has a finger-joint cut
off (obviously a substitute for herself), and if she refuses
even this, a deep notch is cut in a pillar of the house.' We
are now concerned, however, with the finger-offering, not
as a sacrifice to the dead, but as addressed to other deities.
This idea is apparently worked out in the Tongan custom
of tutu-nima, the chopping off a portion of the little finger
with a hatchet or sharp stone as a sacrifice to the gods, for
the recovery of a sick relation of higher rank ; Mariner saw

1 Hcsiod. Thcog. 537. Wclckcr, vol. i. p. 764; vol. ii p. 51.

2 Haug, ' Parsis,' Bombay, 1862, p. 238.

3 Hamilton in ' As. Res.' vol. ii. p. 342.



SACRIFICIAL SUBSTITUTION. 401

children of five years old quarrelling for the honour of
having it done to them. 1 In the Mandan ceremonies of
initiation into manhood, when the youth at last hung sense-
less and (as they called it) lifeless by the cords made fast to
splints through his flesh, he was let down, and coming to
himself crawled on hands and feet round the medicine-lodge
to where an old Indian sat with hatchet in his hand and
a buffalo skull before him ; then the youth, holding up the
little finger of his left hand to the Great Spirit, offered it as
a sacrifice, and it was chopped off, and sometimes the fore-
finger afterwards, upon the skull. 2 In India, probably as a
Dravidian rather than Aryan rite, the practice with full
meaning comes into view ; as Siva cut off his finger to
appease the wrath of Kali, so in the southern provinces
mothers will cut off their own fingers as sacrifices lest they
lose their children, and one hears of a golden finger being
allowed instead, the substitute of a substitute. 3 The New
Zealanders hang locks of hair on branches of trees in the
burying-ground, a recognised place for offerings.* That
hair may be a substitute for its owner is well shown in
Malabar, where we read of the demon being expelled from
the possessed patient and flogged by the exorcist to a tree ;
there the sick man's hair is nailed fast, cut away, and left
for a propitiation to the demon. 8 Thus there is some ground
for interpreting the consecration of the boy's cut hair in
Europe as a representative sacrifice. 6 As for the formal
shedding of blood, it may represent fatal bloodshed, as when



1 Mariner's ' Tonga Is.' vol. i. p. 454 ; vol. ii. p. 222. Cook's ' 3rd Voy.'
vol. i. p. 403. Details from S. Africa in Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. iii. pp. 4,
24 ; Scherzer, ' Voy. of Novara,' vol. i. p. 212.

2 Catlin, ' N. A. Ind.' vol. i. p. 172; Klemm, 'Cultur-Gesch.' vol. ii. p. 170.
See also Venegas, ' Noticia de la California,' vol. i. p. 117 ; Garcilaso de la
Vega, lib. ii. c. 8 (Peru).

8 Buchanan, ' Mysore,' &c., in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 66 1 ; Meiners, vol.
ii. p. 472 ; Bastian, I.e. See also Dubois, ' India,' vol. i. p. 5.

4 Polack, ' New Zealand,' vol. i. p. 264.

5 Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 184.

8 Theodoret. in Levit. xix. ; Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' Details in Bastian,
1 Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 229, &c.



402 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

the Jagas or priests in Quilombo only marked with spears
the children brought in, instead of running them through ; *
or when in Greece a few drops of human blood had come to
stand instead of the earlier and more barbaric human sacri-
fice ; * or when in our own time and under our own rule a
Vishnuite who has inadvertently killed a monkey, a garuda,
or a cobra, may expiate his offence by a mock sacrifice, in
which a human victim is wounded in the thigh, pretends to
die, and goes through the farce of resuscitation, his drawn
blood serving as substitute for his life. 3 One of the most
noteworthy cases of the survival of such formal bloodshed
within modern memory in Europe must be classed as not
Aryan but Turanian, belonging as it does to the folklore of
Esthonia. The sacrificer had to draw drops of blood from
his forefinger, and therewith to pray this prayer, which was
taken down verbatim from one who remembered it : ' I
name thee with my blood and betroth thee with my blood,
and point thee out my buildings to be blessed, stables and
cattle-pens and hen-roosts ; let them be blessed through my
blood and thy might ! ' 'Be my joy, thou Almighty, up-
holder of my forefathers, my protector and guardian of my
life ! I beseech thee by strength of flesh and blood ; receive
the food that I bring thee to thy sustenance and the joy of
my body ; keep me as thy good child, and I will thank and
praise thee. By the help of the Almighty, my own God,
hearken to me ! What through negligence I have done
imperfectly toward thee, do thou forget ! But keep it truly
in remembrance, that I have honestly paid my gifts to my
parents' honour and joy and requital. Moreover falling
down I thrice kiss the earth. Be with me quick in doing,
and peace be with thee hitherto!' 4 These various rites
of finger-cutting, hair-cutting, and blood-letting, have re-
quired mention here from the special point of view of their

1 Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 113 (see other details).

* Pausan. viii. 23 j ix. 8.

8 'TEncyc. Brit.' art. ' Brahma.' See ' Asiat. Res.' vol. ix. p. 387.

4 Boeder, ' Ehsten Aberglaiibische Gebrauche,' &c., p. 4.



SACRIFICIAL SUBSTITUTION. 403

connexion with sacrifice. They belong to an extensive
series of practices, due to various and often obscure motives,
which come under the general heading of ceremonial muti-
lations.

When a life is given for a life, it is still possible to offer a
life less valued than the life in danger. When in Peru the
Inca or some great lord fell sick, he would offer to the deity
one of his sons, imploring him to take this victim in his
stead. 1 The Greeks found it sufficient to offer to the gods
criminals or captives ; 2 and the like was thfe practice of the
heathen tribes of northern Europe, to whom indeed Christian
dealers were accused of selling slaves for sacrificial purposes.*
Among such accounts, the typical story belongs to Punic
history. The Carthaginians, overcome and hard pressed
in the war with Agathokles, set down the defeat to divine
wrath. Now Kronos had in former times received his
sacrifice of the chosen of their sons, but of late they had
put him off with children bought and nourished for the
purpose. In fact they had obeyed the sacrificer's natural
tendency to substitution, but now in time of misfortune
the reaction set in. To balance the account and condone
the parsimonious fraud, a monstrous sacrifice was celebrated.
Two hundred children, of the noblest of the land, were
brought to the idol. ' For there was among them a brazen
statue of Kronos, holding out his hands sloping downward,
so that the child placed on them rolled off and fell into
a certain chasm full of fire.' 4 The Phoenician god here
called Kronos is commonly though not certainly identified
with Moloch. Next, it will help us to realize how the
sacrifice of an animal may atone for a human life, if we
notice in South Africa how a Zulu will redeem a lost child
from the finder by a bullock, or a Kimbunda will expiate
the blood of a slave by the offering of an ox, whose blood

1 Rivero and Tschudi, p. 196. See ' Rites of Yncas,' p. 79.

2 Bastian, p. 112, &c.; Smith's 'Die. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.' art. 'Sacri-
ficium.'

3 Grimm, ' Deutsche Myth.' p. 40.

4 Diodor. Sic. xx. 14.



404 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

will wash away the other. 1 For instances of the animal
substituted for man in sacrifice the following may serve.
Among the Khonds of Orissa, when Colonel Macpherson
was engaged in putting down the sacrifice of human victims
by the sect of the Earth-goddess, they at once began to
discuss the plan of sacrificing cattle by way of substitutes.
Now there is some reason to think that this same course
of ceremonial change may account for the following sacri-
ficial practice in the other Khond sect. It appears that
those who worship the Light-god hold a festival in his
honour, when they slaughter a buffalo in commemoration
of the time when, as they say, the Earth-goddess was pre-
vailing on men to offer human sacrifices to her, but the
Light-god sent a tribe-deity who crushed the bloody-
minded Earth-goddess under a mountain, and dragged a
buffalo out of the jungle, saying, ' Liberate the man, and
sacrifice the buffalo ! ' 2 This legend, divested of its mythic
garb, may really record a historical substitution of animal
for human sacrifice. In Ceylon, the exorcist will demand
the name of the demon possessing a demoniac, and the
patient in frenzy answers, giving the demon's name, ' I am
So-and-so, I demand a human sacrifice and will not go out
without ! ' The victim is promised, the patient comes to
from the fit, and a few weeks later the sacrifice is made,
but instead of a man they offer a fowl. 3 Classic examples
of substitution of this sort may be found in the sacrifice of
a doe for a virgin to Artemis in Laodicaea, a goat for a boy
to Dionysos at Potniae. There appears to be Semitic con-
nexion here, as there clearly is in the story of the ^Eolians
of Tenedos sacrificing to Melikertes (Melkarth) instead of a
new-born child a new-born calf; shoeing it with buskins
and tending the mother-cow as if a human mother. 4
One step more in the course of substitution leads the

1 Callaway, ' Zulu Talcs,' vol. i. p. 88 ; Magyar, ' Siid-Afrika,' p. 256.

Maf*nVipr*rt * Trt^ii * r\ /\fl ifi*

Bastian, ' Mensch,'



SACRIFICIAL SUBSTITUTION. 405

worshipper to make his sacrifice by effigy. An instructive
example of the way in which this kind of substitution arises
may be found in the rites of ancient Mexico. At the yearly
festival of the water-gods and mountain-gods, certain actual
sacrifices of human victims took place in the temples. At
the same time, in the houses of the people, there was
celebrated an unequivocal but harmless imitation of this
bloody rite. They made paste images, adored them, and
in due pretence of sacrifice cut them open at the breast,
took out their hearts, cut off their heads, divided and de-
voured their limbs. 1 In the classic religions of Greece
and Rome, the desire to keep up the consecrated rites
of ages more barbaric, more bloodthirsty, or more pro-
fuse, worked itself out in many a compromise of this class,
such as the brazen statues offered for human victims, the
cakes of dough or wax in the figure of the beasts for which
they were presented as symbolic substitutes.* Not for
economy, but to avoid taking life, Brahmanic sacrifice
has been known to be brought down to offering models
of the victim-animals in meal and butter. 8 The modern
Chinese, whose satisfaction in this kind of make-believe
is so well shown by their despatching paper figures
to serve as attendants for the dead, work out in the
same fanciful way the idea of the sacrificial effigy, in
propitiating the presiding deity of the year for the cure of
a sick man. The rude figure of a man is drawn on or cut
out of a piece of paper, pasted on a slip of bamboo, and
stuck upright in a packet of mock-money. With proper
exorcism, this representative is carried out into the street
with the disease, the priest squirts water from his
mouth over patient, image, and mock-money, the two
latter are burnt, and the company eat up the little feast

1 Clavigero, ' Messico,' vol. ii. p. 82 ; Torquemada, ' Monarquia Indiana,'
x. c. 29; J. G. Miiller, pp. 502, 640. See also ibid. p. 379 (Peru); 'Rites
and Laws of Yncas,' pp. 46, 54.

* Grote, vol. v. p. 366. Schmidt in Smith's ' Die. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.'
art. ' Sacrificium.' Bastian, I.e.

8 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 501.



406 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

laid out for the year-deity. 1 There is curious historical
significance in the custom at the inundation of the Nile at
Cairo, of setting up a conical pillar of earth which the flood
washes away as it rises. This is called the aruseh or bride,
and appears to be a substitute introduced under humaner
Moslem influence, for the young virgin in gay apparel who
in older time was thrown into the river, a sacrifice to obtain
a plentiful inundation. 2 Again, the patient's offering the
model of his diseased limb is distinctly of the nature of a
sacrifice, whether it be propitiatory offering before cure, or
thank-offering after. On the one hand, the ex-voto models
of arms and ears dedicated in ancient Egyptian temples are
thought to be grateful memorials, 8 as seems to have been
the case with metal models of faces, breasts, hands, &c., in
Boeotian temples.* On the other hand, there are cases
where the model and, as it were, substitute of the diseased
part is given to obtain a cure; thus in early Christian
times in Germany protest was made against the heathen
custom of hanging up carved wooden limbs to a helpful idol
for relief, 6 and in modern India the pilgrim coming for cure
will deposit in the temple the image of his diseased limb,
in gold or silver or copper according to his means.*

If now we look for the sacrificial idea within the range
of modern Christendom, we shall find it in two ways not ob-
scurely manifest. It survives in traditional folklore, and it
holds a place in established religion. One of its most re-
markable survivals may be seen in Bulgaria, where sacrifice
of live victims is to this day one of the accepted rites of the
land. They sacrifice a lamb on St. George's day, telling to ac-
count for the custom a legend which combines the episodes of
the offering of Isaac and the miracle of the Three Children.

Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 152.

Lane, ' Modern Eg.' vol. ii. p. 262. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 85.
Wilkinson, ' Ancient Eg.' vol. iii. p. 395 ; and in Rawlinson's Herodotus ,
vo ii. p. 137. See i Sam. vi. 4.

Grimm, ' Deutsche Myth.' p. 1131.

Ibid.

Bastian, vol. iii. p. 116.



SURVIVAL OF SACRIFICE. 407

On the feast of the Panagia (Virgin Mary) sacrifices of
lambs, kids, honey, wine, &c., are offered in order that the
children of the house may enjoy good health throughout the
year. A little child divines by touching one of three saints'
candles to which the offering is to be dedicated ; when the
choice is thus made, the bystanders each drink a cup of
wine, saying ' Saint So-and-So, to thee is the offering.'
Then they cut the throat of the lamb, or smother the bees,
and in the evening the whole village assembles to eat the
various sacrifices, and the men end the ceremony with the
usual drunken bout. 1 Within the borders of Russia, many
and various sacrifices are still offered ; such is the horse with
head smeared with honeyand mane decked with ribbons, cast
into the river with two millstones to its neck to appease the
water-spirit, the Vodyany, at his spiteful flood-time in early
spring ; and such is the portion of supper left out for the
house-demon, the domovoy, who if not thus fed is apt to
turn spirit-rapper, and knock the tables and benches about
at night. 8 In many another district of Europe, the tenaci-
ous memory of the tiller of the soil has kept up in wondrous
perfection heirlooms from prae-Christian faiths. In Fran-
conia, people will pour on the ground a libation before
drinking ; entering a forest they will put offerings of bread
and fruit on a stone, to avert the attacks of the demon of-
the woods, the ' bilberry-man ; ' the bakers will throw
white rolls into the oven flue for luck, and say, ' Here,
devil, they are thine ! ' The Carinthian peasant will fodder
the wind by setting up a dish of food in a tree before his
house, and the fire by casting in lard and dripping, in order
that gale and conflagration may not hurt him. At least up
to the end of the i8th century this most direct elemental
sacrifice might be seen in Germany at the midsummer
festival in the most perfect form ; some of the porridge

1 St. Clair and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 43. Compare modern Circassian
sacrifice of animal before cross, as substitute for child, in Bell, ' Circassia,'
vol. ii.

1 Ralston, ' Songs of Russian People,' pp. 123, 153, &c.



408 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

from the table was thrown into the fire, and some into run-
ning water, some was buried in the earth, and some smeared
on leaves and put on the chimney-top for the winds. 1
Relics of such ancient sacrifice may be found in Scandi-
navia to this day ; to give but one example, the old country
altars, rough earth-fast stones with cup-like hollows, are still
visited by mothers whose children have been smitten with
sickness by the trolls, and who smear lard into the hollows
and leave rag-dolls as offerings. 1 France may be repre-
sented by the country-women's custom of beginning a meal
by throwing down a spoonful of milk or bouillon ; and by
the record of the custom of Andrieux in Dauphiny, where
at the solstice the villagers went out upon the bridge when
the sun rose, and offered him an omelet.* The custom of
burning alive the finest calf, to save a murrain-struck herd,
had its last examples in Cornwall in the iQth century ;
the records of bealtuinn sacrifices in Scotland continue in
the Highlands within a century ago ; and Scotchmen still
living remember the corner of a field being left untilled for
the Goodman's Croft (i.e., the Devil's), but the principle of
' cheating the devil ' was already in vogue, and the piece
of land allotted was but a worthless scrap. 4 It is a
remnant of old sacrificial rite, when the Swedes still bake
at yule-tide a cake in the shape of a boar, representing the
boar sacrificed of old to Freyr, and Oxford to this day com-
memorates the same ancestral ceremony, when the boar's
head is carried in to the Christmas feast at Queen's College,
with its appointed carol, ' Caput apri defero, Reddens
laudes Domino.'* With a lingering recollection of the old

1 Wuttke, 4 Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 86. See also Grimm, ' Deutsche
Myth.' pp. 417, 602.

* Hyltin-Cavallius, ' Warend och Wirdarne,' part i. pp. 131, 146, 157, Ac.

* Monnier, ' Traditions Populaires,' pp. 187, 666.

4 R. Hunt, ' Pop. Rom. of W. of England,' ist Ser. p. 237. Pennant,
4 Tour in Scotland,' in Pinkerton, vol. Hi. p. 49. J. Y. Simpson, Address
to Soc. Antiq. Scotland, 1861, p. 33 ; Brand, ' Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. pp. 74,

37-

* Brand, vol. i. p. 484. Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 45, 194, 1188, see p. 250 5
' Deutsche Rechtsalterthumer,' p. 900 ; Hyltin-Cavallius, part i. p. 175.



SURVIVAL OF SACRIFICE. 409

libations, the German toper's saying still runs that heeltaps
are a devil's offering. 1

As for sacrificial rites most fully and officially existing in
modern Christendom, the presentation of ex-votos is one.
The ecclesiastical opposition to the continuance of these
classic thank-offerings was but temporary and partial. In
the 5th century it seems to have been usual to offer silver
and gold eyes, feet, &c., to saints in acknowledgment of
cures they had effected. At the beginning of the i6th
century, Polydore Vergil, describing the classic custom,
goes on to say : ' In the same manner do we now offer up
in our churches sigillaria, that is, little images of wax, and
oscilla. As oft as any part of the body is hurt, as the hand,
foot, breast, we presently make a vow to God, and his
saints, to whom upon our recovery we make an offering of
that hand or foot or breast shaped in wax, which custom
has so far obtained that this kind of images have passed to
the other animals. Wherefore so for an ox, so for a horse,
so for a sheep, we place puppets in the temples. In which
thing any modestly scrupulous person may perhaps say he
knows not whether we are rivalling the religion or the
superstition of the ancients.' 2 In modern Europe the
custom prevails largely, but has perhaps somewhat subsided
into low levels of society, to judge by the general use of
mock silver and such-like worthless materials for the dedi-
cated effigies. In Christian as in prae-Christian temples,
clouds of incense rise as of old. Above all, though the
ceremony of sacrifice did not form an original part of
Christian worship, its prominent place in the ritual was
obtained in early centuries. In that Christianity was re-
cruited among nations to whom the conception of sacrifice
was among the deepest of religious ideas, and the ceremony
of sacrifice among the sincerest efforts of worship, there
arose an observance suited to supply the vacant place.

1 Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 962.

* Beausobre, vol. ii. p. 667. Polydorus Vergilius, De Inventoribus Rerum.
(Basel, 1521), lib. v. i.



410 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

This result was obtained not by new introduction, but by
transmutation. The solemn eucharistic meal of the primi-
tive Christians in time assumed the name of the sacrifice
of the mass, and was adapted to a ceremonial in which an
offering of food and drink is set out by a priest on an altar
in a temple, and consumed by priest and worshippers. The
natural conclusion of an ethnographic survey of sacrifice,
is to point to the controversy between Protestants and
Catholics, for centuries past one of the keenest which
have divided the Christian world, on this express question
whether sacrifice is or is not a Christian rite.

The next group of rites to be considered comprises
Fasting and certain other means of producing ecstasy and
other morbid exaltation for religious ends. In the fore-
going researches on animism, it is frequently observed or
implied that the religious beliefs of the lower races are in
no small measure based on the evidence of visions and
dreams, regarded as actual intercourse with spiritual beings.
From the earliest phases of culture upward, we find religion
in close alliance with ecstatic physical conditions. These
are brought on by various means of interference with the
healthy action of body and mind, and it is scarcely needful
to remind the reader that, according to philosophic theories
antecedent to those of modern medicine, such morbid dis-
turbances are explained as symptoms of divine visitation,
or at least of superhuman spirituality. Among the strongest
means of disturbing the functions of the mind so as to
produce ecstatic vision, is fasting, accompanied as it
so usually is with other privations, and with prolonged
solitary contemplation in the desert or the forest. Among
the ordinary vicissitudes of savage life, the wild hunter has
many a time to try involuntarily the effects of such a life
for days and weeks together, and under these circumstances
he soon comes to see and talk with phantoms which are to
him visible personal spirits. The secret of spiritual inter-
course thus learnt, he has thenceforth but to reproduce the
cause in order to renew the effects.



FASTING. 411

The rite of fasting, and the utter objective reality ascribed
to what we call its morbid symptoms, are shown in striking
details among the savage tribes of North America. Among
the Indians (the accounts mostly refer to the Algonquin
tribes), long and rigorous fasting is enjoined among boys
and girls from a very early age ; to be able to fast long is
an enviable distinction, and they will abstain from food
three to seven days, or even more, taking only a little
water. During these fasts, especial attention is paid to
dreams. Thus Tanner tells the story of a certain Net-
no-kwa, who at twelve years old fasted ten successive days,
till in a dream a man came and stood before her, and after
speaking of many things gave her two sticks, saying, ' I
give you these to walk upon, and your hair I give it to be
like snow ; ' this assurance of extreme old age was through
life a support to her in times of danger and distress. At
manhood the Indian lad, retiring to a solitary place to fast
and meditate and pray, receives visionary impressions
which stamp his character for life, and especially he waits
till there appears to him in a dream some animal or thing
which will be henceforth his ' medicine,' the fetish-repre-
sentative of his manitu or protecting genius. For instance,
an aged warrior who had thus in his youth dreamed of a
bat coming to him, wore the skin of a bat on the crown of
his head henceforth, and was all his life invulnerable to his
enemies as a bat on the wing. In after life, an Indian who
wants anything will fast till he has a dream that his manitu
will grant it him. While the men are away hunting, the
children are sometimes made to fast, that in their dreams
they may obtain omens of the chase. Hunters fasting
before an expedition are informed in dreams of the haunts
of the game, and the means of appeasing the wrath of the
bad spirits ; if the dreamer fancies he sees an Indian who
has been long dead, and hears him say, ' If thou wilt
sacrifice to me thou shalt shoot deer at pleasure,' he will
prepare a sacrifice, and burn the whole or part of a deer,
in honour of the apparition. Especially the ' meda ' or



412 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

' medicine-man ' receives in fasts much of his qualifica-
tion for his sacred office. The Ojibwa prophetess, known
in after life as Catherine Wabose, in telling the story of
her early years, relates how at the age of womanhood she
fasted in her secluded lodge till she went up into the
heavens and saw the spirit at the entrance, the Bright Blue
Sky ; this was the first supernatural communication of her
prophetic career. The account given to Schoolcraft by
Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief deeply versed in the mystic
lore and picture-writing of his people, is as follows :
' Chingwauk began by saying that the ancient Indians
made a great merit of fasting. They fasted sometimes
six or seven days, till both their bodies and minds became
free and light, which prepared them to dream. The object
of the ancient seers was to dream of the sun, as it was
believed that such a dream would enable them to see every-
thing on the earth. And by fasting long and thinking
much on the subject, they generally succeeded. Fasts
and dreams were at first attempted at an early age. What
a young man sees and experiences during these dreams and
fasts, is adopted by him as truth, and it becomes a prin-
ciple to regulate his future life. He relies for success on
these revelations. If he has been much favoured in his
fasts, and the people believe that he has the art of looking
into futurity, the path is open to the highest honours.
The prophet, he continued, begins to try his power in
secret, with only one assistant, whose testimony is neces-
sary should he succeed. As he goes on, he puts down
the figures of his dreams and revelations, by symbols,
on bark or other material, till a whole winter is some-
times passed in pursuing the subject, and he thus has
a record of his principal revelations. If what he pre-
dicts is verified, the assistant mentions it, and the record
is then appealed to as proof of his prophetic power and
skill. Time increases his fame. His kee-keS-wins, or
records, are finally shown to the old people, who meet
together and consult upon them, for the whole nation



FASTING. 413

believe in these revelations. They in the end give their
approval, and declare that he is gifted as a prophet is
inspired with wisdom, and is fit to lead the opinions of the
nation. Such, he concluded, was the ancient custom, and
.the celebrated old war-captains rose to their power in this
manner.' It remains to say that among these American
tribes, the ' jossakeed ' or soothsayer prepares himself by
fasting and the use of the sweating-bath for the state of
convulsive ecstasy in which he utters the dictates of his
familiar spirits. 1

The practice of fasting is described in other districts of
the uncultured world as carried on to produce similar
ecstasy and supernatural converse. The account by Roman
Pane in the Life of Colon describes the practice in Hayti
of fasting to obtain knowledge of future events from the
spirits (cemi) ; and a century or two later, rigorous fasting
formed part of the apprentice's preparation for the craft of
' boye" ' or sorcerer, evoker, consulter, propitiator, and
exerciser of spirits.* The ' keebet ' or conjurers of the
Abipones were believed by the natives to be able to inflict
disease and death, cure all disorders, make known distant
and future events, cause rain, hail, and tempests, call up
the shades of the dead, put on the form of tigers, handle
serpents unharmed, &c. These powers were imparted by
diabolical assistance, and Father Dobrizh offer thus describes
the manner of obtaining them : ' Those who aspire to the
office of juggler are said to sit upon an aged willow, over-
hanging some lake, and to abstain from food for several
days, till they begin to see into futurity. It always
appeared probable to me that these rogues, from long
fasting, contract a weakness of brain, a giddiness, and kind

1 Tanner's ' Narrative,' p. 288. Loskiel, ' N. A. Ind.' part i. p. 76, School-
craft, ' Ind. Tribes,' part i. pp. 34, 113, 360, 391 ; part iii. p. 227. Catlin,
' N. A. Ind.' vol. i. p. 36. Charlevoix, ' Nouv. Fr.' vol. ii. p. 170 ; vol. vi.
p. 67. Klemm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. ii. p. 170. Waitz, ' Anthropologie,' vol.
iii. pp. 206, 217.

1 Colombo, ' Vita,' ch. xxv. Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 501. See also
Meiners, vol. ii. p. 143 (Guyana).



414 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

of delirium, which makes them imagine that they are gifted
with superior wisdom, and give themselves out for magi-
cians. They impose upon themselves first, and afterwards
upon others.' 1 The Malay, to make himself invulnerable,
retires for three days to solitude and scanty food in the
jungle, and if on the third day he dreams of a beautiful
spirit descending to speak to him, the charm is worked.*
The Zulu doctor qualifies himself for intercourse with the
' amadhlozi,' or ghosts, from whom he is to obtain direc-
tion in his craft, by spare abstemious diet, want, suffering,
castigation, and solitary wandering, till fainting fits or coma
bring him into direct intercourse with the spirits. These
native diviners fast often, and are worn out by fastings,
sometimes of several days' duration, when they become
partially or wholly ecstatic, and see visions. So thoroughly
is the connexion between fasting and spiritual intercourse
acknowledged by the Zulus, that it has become a saying
among them, ' The continually stuffed body cannot see
secret things.' They have no faith in a fat prophet.*

The effects thus looked for and attained by fasting among
uncultured tribes continue into the midst of advanced civili-
zation. No wonder that, in the Hindu tale, king Vasava-
datta and his queen after a solemn penance and a three
days' fast should see Siva in a dream and receive his gra-
cious tidings ; no wonder that, in the actual experience of
to-day, the Hindu yogi should bring on by fasting a state
in which he can with bodily eyes behold the gods. 4 The
Greek oracle-priests recognized fasting as a means of bring-
ing on prophetic dreams and visions ; the Pythia of Delphi
herself fasted for inspiration ; Galen remarks that fasting
dreams are the clearer. 8 Through after ages, both cause

Dobrizhoffer, ' Abiponei,' vol. ii. p. 68.

St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 144.

Dohne, ' Zulu Die.' s.v. ' nyanga ; ' Grout, ' Zulu-land,' p. 158; Calla-
way, ' Religion of Amazulu,' p. 387.

Somadeva Bhatta, tr. Brockhaus, vol. ii. p. 81. Meinen, vol. ii. p. 147.

Maury, ' Magic,' &c., p. 237 ; Pausan. i. 34 ; Philostrat. Apollon. Tyan.
i. ; Galen. Comment, in Hippocrat. i.



FASTING. 415

and consequence have held their places in Christendom.
Thus Michael the Archangel, with sword in right hand
and scales in left, appears to a certain priest of Siponte,
who during a twelvemonth's course of prayer and fasting
had been asking if he would have a temple built in his
honour :

' precibus jejunia longis
Addiderat, totoque orans se afflixcrat anno.' 1

Reading the narratives of the wondrous sights seen by
St. Theresa and her companions, how the saint went in
spirit into hell and saw the darkness and fire and unutter-
able despair, how she had often by her side her good patrons
Peter and Paul, how when she was raised in rapture above
the grate at the nunnery where she was to take the sacra-
ment, Sister Mary Baptist and others being present, they
saw an angel by her with a golden fiery dart at the end
whereof was a little fire, and he thrust it through her heart
and bowels and pulled them out with it, leaving her wholly
inflamed with a great love of God the modern reader
naturally looks for details of physical condition and habit
of life among the sisterhood, and as naturally finds that
St. Theresa was of morbid constitution and subject to
trances from her childhood, in after life subduing her flesh
by long watchings and religious discipline, and keeping
severe fast during eight months of the year.* It is needless
to multiply such mediaeval records of fasts which have pro-
duced their natural effects in beatific vision are they not
written page after page in the huge folios of the Bollandists ?
So long as fasting is continued -as a religious rite, so long
its consequences in morbid mental exaltation will continue
the old and savage doctrine that morbid phantasy is super-
natural experience. Bread and meat would have robbed
the ascetic of many an angel's visit ; the opening of the
refectory door must many a time have closed the gates of
heaven to his gaze.

1 Baptist. Mantuan. Fast. ix. 350.

* ' Acta Sanctorum Holland.' S. Theresa.



416 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

It is indeed not the complete theory of fasting as a reli-
gious rite, but only an important and perhaps original part
of it, that here comes into view. Abstinence from food
has a principal place among acts of self-mortification or
penance, a province of religious ordinance into which the
present argument scarcely enters. Looking at the practice
of fasting here from an animistic point of view, as a process
of bringing on dreams and visions, it will be well to mention
with it certain other means by which ecstatic phenomena
are habitually induced.

One of these means is the use of drugs. In the West India
Islands at the time of the discovery, Columbus describes
the religious ceremony of placing a platter containing ' co-
hoba ' powder on the head of the idol, the worshippers then
snuffing up this powder through a cane with two branches
put to the nose. Pane further describes how the native
priest, when brought to a sick man, would put himself in
communication with the spirits by thus snuffing cohoba,
' which makes him drunk, that he knows not what he does,
and so says many extraordinary things, wherein they affirm
that they are talking with the cemis, and that from them it
is told them that the infirmity came.' On the Amazons,
the Omaguas have continued to modern times the use of
narcotic plants, producing an intoxication lasting twenty-
four hours, during which they are subject to extraordinary
visions ; from one of these plants they obtain the ' curupa '
powder which they snuff into their nostrils with a Y-shaped
reed. 1 Here the similar names and uses of the drug plainly
show historical connexion between the Omaguas and the An-
tilles islanders. The Californian Indians would give children
narcotic potions, in order to gain from the ensuing visions
information about their enemies ; and thus the Mundrucus

1 Colombo, ' Vita,' ch. Ixii. ; Roman Pane, ibid. ch. xv. ; and in Pinkerton,
vol. xii. Condamine, ' Travels,' in Pinkerton, vol. xiv. p. 226 ; Martins,
' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. pp. 441, 631 (details of snuff -powders among
Omaguas, Otomacs, &c. ; native names curupa, parica, niopo, nupa ; made
from seeds of Mimosa acacioides, Acacia niopo).



ECSTASY BY DRUGS. 417

of North Brazil, desiring to discover murderers, would
administer such drinks to seers, in whose dreams the
criminals appeared. 1 The Darien Indians used the seeds of
the Datura sanguinea to bring on in children prophetic
delirium, in which they revealed hidden treasure. In Peru
the priests who talked with the ' huaca ' or fetishes used
to throw themselves into an ecstatic condition by a narcotic
drink called ' tonca,' made from the same plant, whence
its name of ' huacacacha ' or fetish-herb.* The Mexican
priests also appear to have used an ointment or drink made
with seeds of ' ololiuhqui,' which produced delirium and
visions. 8 In both Americas tobacco served for such pur-
poses. It must be noticed that smoking is more or less
practised among native races to produce full intoxication,
the smoke being swallowed for the purpose. By smoking
tobacco, the sorcerers of Brazilian tribes raised themselves
to ecstasy in their convulsive orgies, and saw spirits ; no
wonder tobacco came to be called the ' holy herb.'* So
North American Indians held intoxication by tobacco to be
supernatural ecstasy, and the dreams of men in this state
to be inspired. 6 This idea may explain a remarkable pro-
ceeding of the Delaware Indians. At their festival in
honour of the Fire-god with his twelve attendant manitus,
inside the house of sacrifice a small oven-hut was set up,
consisting of twelve poles tied together at the top and
covered with blankets, high enough for a man to stand
nearly upright within it. After the feast this oven was
heated with twelve red-hot stones, and twelve men crept
inside. An old man threw twelve pipefulls of tobacco on
these stones, and when the patients had borne to the utmost



1 Maury, ' Magic,' &c., p. 425.

1 Seemann, ' Voy. of Herald,' vol. i. p. 256. Rivero and Tschudi, ' Peru-
vian Antiquities,' p. 184. J. G. Mxiller, p. 397.

* Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 558 ; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 40 ; J. 0.
Mullet, p. 656.

4 J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrelig.' p. 277 ; Hernandez, ' Historia Mcxicana,'
lib. v. c. 51 ; Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1292.

* D. Wilson, ' Prehistoric Man,' vol. i. p. 487.



418 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

the heat and suffocating smoke, they were taken out, gene-
rally falling in a swoon. 1 This practice, which was carried
on in the last century, is remarkable for its coincidence
with the Scythian mode of purification after a funeral, as
described by Herodotus. He relates that they make their
hut with three stakes sloping together at the top and
covered in with wooden felts ; then they cast red-hot stones
into a trough placed within and throw hemp-seed on them,
which sends forth fumes such as no Greek vapour-bath
could exceed, and the Scyths in their sweating-hut roar
with delight. 1

Not to dwell on the ancient Aryan deification of an
intoxicating drink, the original of the divine Soma of the
Hindus and the divine Haoma of the Parsis, nor on the
drunken orgies of the worship of Dionysos in ancient
Greece, we find more exact Old World analogues of the
ecstatic medicaments used in the lower culture. Such are
the decoctions of thalassaegle which Pliny speaks of as
drunk to produce delirium and visions ; the drugs men-
tioned by Hesychius, whereby Hekate was evoked ; the
mediaeval witch-ointments which brought visionary beings
into the presence of the patient, transported him to the
witches' sabbath, enabled him to turn into a beast.* The
survival of such practices is most thorough among the
Persian dervishes of our own day. These mystics are not
only opium-eaters, like so large a proportion of their
countrymen ; they are hashish-smokers, and the effect of
this drug is to bring them into a state of exaltation passing
into utter hallucination. To a patient in this condition,
says Dr. Polak, a little stone in the road will seem a great
block that he must stride over ; a gutter becomes a wide
stream to his eyes, and he calls for a boat to ferry him



1 Loskiel, ' Ind. of N. A.' part i. p. 42.

* Herodot. iv. 73-5.

* Maury, ' Magic,' &c., I.e. ; Plin. xxiv. 102; Hesych. s.v. ' iSn

See also Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 152, &c. ; Baring-Gould, 'Were-
wolves,' p. 149.



INDUCED ECSTASY. 419

across-; men's voices sound like thunder in his ears ; he
fancies he has wings and can rise from the ground. These
ecstatic effects, in which miracle is matter of hourly expe-
rience, are considered in Persia as high religious develop-
ments ; the visionaries and their rites are looked on as holy,
and they make converts. 1

Many details of the production of ecstasy and swoon by
bodily exercises, chanting and screaming, &c., have been
incidentally given in describing the doctrine of demoniacal
possession. I will only further cite a few typical cases to
show that the practice of bringing on swoons or fits by
religious exercises, in reality or pretence, is one belonging
originally to savagery, whence it has been continued into
higher grades of civilization. We may judge of the mental
and bodily condition of the priest or sorcerer in Guyana, by
his preparation for his sacred office. This consisted in the
first place in fasting and flagellation of extreme severity ; at
the end of his fast he had to dance till he fell senseless, and
was revived by a potion of tobacco- juice causing violent
nausea and vomiting of blood ; day after day this treatment
was continued till the candidate, brought into or confirmed
in the condition of a ' cpnvulsionary,' was ready to pass
from patient into doctor. 8 Again, at the Winnebago medi-
cine-feast, members of the fraternity assemble in a long
arched booth, and with them the candidates for initiation,
whose preparation is a three days' fast, with severe sweating
and steaming with herbs, under the direction of the old
medicine-men. The initiation is performed in the assembly
by a number of medicine-men. These advance in line, as
many abreast as there are candidates ; holding their medi-
cine-bags before them with both hands, they dance forward
slowly at first, uttering low guttural sounds as they approach
the candidates, their step and voice increasing in energy,
until with a violent ' Ough ! ' they thrust their medicine-

1 Polak, ' Persien,' vol. ii. p. 245 ; Vamblry in ' Mem. Anthrop. Soc.'
vol. ii. p. 2O ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 2l6.
1 Meiners, vol. ii. p. 162.



420 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

bags at their breasts. Instantly, as if struck with an electric
shock, the candidates fall prostrate on their faces, their
limbs extended, their muscles rigid and quivering. Blankets
are now thrown over them, and they are suffered to lie thus
a few moments ; as soon as they show signs of recovering
from the shock, they are assisted to their feet and led forward.
Medicine-bags are then put in their hands, and medicine -
stones in their mouths ; they are now medicine men or
women, as the case may be, in full communion and fellow-
ship ; and they now go round the bower in company with
the old members, knocking others down promiscuously by
thrusting their medicine-bags at them. A feast and dance
to the music of drum and rattle carry on the festival. 1
Another instance may be taken from among the Alfurus of
Celebes, inviting Empong Lembej to descend into their
midst. The priests chant, the chief priest with twitching
and trembling limbs turns his eyes towards heaven ; Lembej
descends into him, and with horrible gestures he springs
upon a board, beats about with a bundle of leaves, leaps
and dances, chanting legends of an ancient deity. After
some hours another priest relieves him, and sings of another
deity. So it goes on day and night till the fifth day, and
then the chief priest's tongue is cut, he falls into a swoon
like death, and they cover him up. They fumigate with
benzoin the piece taken from his tongue, and swing a censer
over his body, calling back his soul ; he revives and dances
about, lively but speechless, till they give him back the rest
of his tongue, and with it his power of speech. 1 Thus, in
the religion of uncultured races, the phenomenon of being
' struck ' holds so recognised a position that impostors
will even counterfeit it. In its morbid nature, its genuine
cases at least plainly correspond with the fits which history
records among the convulsionnaires of St. Medard and the
enthusiasts of the Cevennes. Nor need we go even a gene-

1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 286.

1 Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 145. Compare ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 247
(Aracan).



INDUCED ECSTASY. 421

ration back to see symptoms of the same type accepted as
signs of grace among ourselves. Medical descriptions of
the scenes brought on by fanatical preachers at ' revivals '
in England, Ireland, and America, are full of interest to
students of the history of religious rites. I will but quote a
single case. ' A young woman is described as lying ex-
tended at full length ; her eyes closed, her hands clasped
and elevated, and her body curved in a spasm so violent
that it appeared to rest arch-like upon her heels and the
back portion of her head. In that position she lay without
speech or motion for several minutes. Suddenly she uttered
a terrific scream, and tore handfuls of hair from her un-
covered head. Extending her open hands in a repelling
attitude of the most appalling terror, she exclaimed, " Oh,
that fearful pit ! " During this paroxysm three strong men
were hardly able to restrain her. She extended her arms
on either side, clutching spasmodically at the grass, shudder-
ing with terror, and shrinking from some fearful inward
vision ; but she ultimately fell back exhausted, nerveless,
and apparently insensible.' 1 Such descriptions carry us
far back in the history of the human mind, showing modern
men still in ignorant sincerity producing the very fits and
swoons to which for untold ages savage tribes have given
religious import. These manifestations in modern Europe
indeed form part of a revival of religion, the religion of
mental disease.

From this series of rites, practical with often harmful
practicality, we turn to a group of ceremonies whose charac-
teristic is picturesque symbolism. In discussing sun-myth
and sun-worship, it has come into view how deeply the
association in men's mind of the east with light and warmth,
life and happiness and glory, of the west with darkness and
chill, death and decay, has from remote ages rooted itself in
religious belief. It will illustrate and confirm this view to
observe how the same symbolism of east and west has taken
shape in actual ceremony, giving rise to a series of practices

1 D. H. Tuke in ' Journal of Mental Science,' Oct. 1870, p. 368.



422 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

concerning the posture of the dead in their graves and the
living in their temples, practices which may be classed under
the general heading of Orientation.

While the setting sun has shown to men, from savage
ages onward, the western region of death, the rising sun has
displayed a scene more hopeful, an eastern home of deity.
It seems to be the working out of the solar analogy, on the
one hand in death as sunset, on the other in new life as
sunrise, that has produced two contrasted rules of burial,
which agree in placing the dead in the sun's path, the line
of east and west. Thus the natives of Australia have in
some districts well-marked thoughts of the western land of
the dead, yet the custom of burying the dead sitting with
face to the east is also known among them. 1 The Samoans
and Fijians, agreeing that the land of the departed lies in
the far west, bury the corpse lying with head east and feet
west ; * the body would but have to rise and walk straight
onward to follow its soul home. This idea is stated ex-
plicitly among the Winnebagos of North America ; they will
sometimes bury a dead man sitting up to the breast in a
hole in the ground, looking westward ; or graves are dug
east and west, and the bodies laid in them with the head
eastward, with the motive ' that they may look towards the
happy land in the west.' 8 With these customs may be
compared those of certain South American tribes. The
Yumanas bury their dead bent double with faces looking
toward the heavenly region of the sunrise, the home of
their great good deity, who they trust will take their souls
with him to his dwelling ; * the Guarayos bury the corpses
with heads turned to the east, for it is in the eastern sky
that their god Tamoi, the Ancient of Heaven, has his
happy hunting-grounds where the dead will meet again.'



1 Grey, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 327.

* Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 230. Seem arm, ' Viti,' p. 151.

8 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iv. p. 54.

4 Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 485.

8 D'Orbigny, ' L'Homme Americain,' vol. ii. pp. 319, 330.



ORIENTATION. 423

On the other hand the Peruvian custom was to place the
dead huddled up in a sitting posture and with faces turned
to the west. 1 Barbaric Asia may be represented by the
modern Ainos of Yesso, burying the dead lying robed in
white with the head to the east, ' because that is where the
sun rises ; ' or by the Tunguz who bury with the head to
the west ; or by the mediaeval Tatars, raising a great mound
over the dead, and setting up thereon a statue with face
turned toward the east, holding a drinking-cup in his hand
before his navel ; or by the modern Siamese, who do not
sleep with their heads to the west, because it is in this
significant position that the dead are burned.* The burial
of the dead among the ancient Greeks in the line of east
and west, whether according to Athenian custom of the
head toward the sunset, or the converse, is another link in
the chain of custom. 8 Thus it is not to late and isolated
fancy, but to the carrying on of ancient and widespread
solar ideas, that we trace the well-known legend that the
body of Christ was laid with the head toward the west, thus
looking eastward, and the Christian usage of digging graves
east and west, which prevailed through mediaeval times and
is not yet forgotten. The rule of laying the head to the
west, and its meaning that the dead shall rise looking toward
the east, are perfectly stated in the following passage from
an ecclesiastical treatise of the i6th century : ' Debet autem
quis sic sepeliri, ut capite ad occidentem posito, pedes
dirigat ad orientem, in quo quasi ipsa positione orat : et
innuit quod promptus est, ut de occasu festinet ad ortum :
de mundo ad seculum.' 4



1 Rivero and Tschudi, ' Peruvian Antiquities,' p. 202. See also Arbousset
and Daumas, 'Voyage,' p. 277 (Kafirs).

* Biclcmore, in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 20. Georgi, ' Reise,' vol. i.
p. 266. Gul. de Rubruquis in Hakluyt vol. i. p. 78. Bastian, ipestl.
Asien,' vol. iii. p. 228.

* /Elian. Var. Hist. v. 14, vii. 19 ; Plutarch. Solon, x. ; Diog. Laert.
Solon ; Welcker, vol. i. p. 404..

* Beda in Die S. Paschae. Durand, Rationale Divinorum O/ficiorum, lib.
vii. c. 35-9. Brand, ' Popular Antiquities,' vol. ii. pp. 295, 318.



424 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

Where among the lower races sun-worship begins to con-
solidate itself in systematic ritual, the orientation of the
worshipper and the temple becomes usual and distinct.
The sun-worshipping Comanches, preparing for the war-
path, will place* their weapons betimes on the east side of
the lodge to receive the sun's first rays ; it is a remnant of
old solar rite, that the Christianized Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico turn to the sun at his rising. 1 It has been already
noticed how in old times each morning at sunrise the Sun-
chief of the Natchez of Louisiana stood facing the east at
the door of his house, and smoked toward the sun first,
before he turned to the other three quarters of the world. 8
The cave-temple of the sun-worshipping Apalaches of
Florida had its opening looking east, and within stood the
priests on festival days at dawn, waiting till the first rays
entered to begin the appointed rites of chant and incense
and offering. 8 In old Mexico, where sun-worship was the
central doctrine of the complex religion, men knelt in prayer
towards the east, and the doors of the sanctuaries looked
mostly westward. 4 It was characteristic of the solar worship
of Peru that even the villages were habitually built on slopes
toward the east, that the people might see and greet the
national deity at his rising. In the temple of the sun at
Cuzco, his splendid golden disc on the western wall looked
out through the eastern door, so that as he rose his first
beams fell upon it, reflected thence to light up the sanc-
tuary. 1

In Asia, the ancient Aryan religion of the sun manifests
itself not less plainly hi rites of orientation. They have
their place in the weary ceremonial routine which the Brah-



1 Gregg, ' Commerce of Prairies,' vol. i. pp. 270, 273 ; vol. ii. p. 318.
1 Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 178.

* Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 365.

4 Clavigero, ' Messico,' vol. ii. p. 24 ; J. G. Muller, p. 641. See Oviedo,
Nicaragua,' p. 29.

J. G. Muller, p. 363 ; Prescott, ' Peru,' book i. ch. 3. Garcilaso de la
Vega, ' Commentaries Reales,' lib. iii. c. 20, says it was at the east end ; cf .
lib. vi. c. 21 (llama sacrificed with head to east).



ORIENTATION. 425

man must daily accomplish. When he has performed the
dawn ablution, and meditated on the effulgent sun-light
which is Brahma, the supreme soul, he proceeds to worship
the sun, standing on one foot and resting the other against
his ankle or heel, looking toward the east, and holding his
hands open before him in a hollow form. At noon, when
he has again adored the sun, it is sitting with his face to
the east that he must read his daily portion of the Veda ; it
is looking toward the east that his offering of barley and
water must be first presented to the gods, before he turns
to north and south ; it is with first and principal direction
to the east that the consecration of the fire and the sacrifi-
cial implements, a ceremony which is the groundwork of ill
his religious acts, has to be performed. 1 The significance
of such reverence paid by adorers of the sun to the glorio.is
eastern region of his rising, may be heightened to us by
setting beside it a ceremony of a darker faith, displaying
the awe-struck horror of the western home of death. The
antithesis to the eastward consecration by the orthodox
Brahmans is the westward consecration by the Thugs,
worshippers of Kali the death-goddess. In honour of Kali
their victims were murdered, and to her the sacred pickaxe
was consecrated, wherewith the graves of the slain were dug.
At the time of the suppression of Thuggee, Englishmen
had the consecration of the pickaxe performed in make-
believe in their presence by those who well knew the dark
ritual. On the dreadful implement no shadow of any living
thing must fall, its consecrator sits facing the west to per-
form the fourfold washing and the sevenfold passing through
the fire, and then it being proved duly consecrated by the
omen of the coeo-nut divided at a single cut, it is placed
on the ground, and the bystanders worship it, turning to
the west.*
These two contrasted rites of east and west established

1 Colebrooke, ' Essays/ vol. i., iv. and v.

a ' Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs,' London, 1837,
p. 46.

II. 2 E



426 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

themselves and still remain established in modern European
religion. In judging of the course of history that has
brought about this state of things, it scarcely seems that
Jewish influence was effective. The Jewish temple had the
entrance in the east, and the sanctuary in the west. Sun-
worship was an abomination to the Jews, and the orientation
especially belonging to it appears as utterly opposed to
Jewish usage, in Ezekiel's horror-stricken vision : ' and,
behold, at the door of the temple ol Jehovah, between the
porch and the altar, about five-and-twenty men, with their
backs toward the temple of Jehovah, and their faces toward
the east, and they worshipped the sun toward the east.' 1
Nor is there reason to suppose that in later ages such
orientation gained ground in Jewish ceremony. The solar
rites of other nations whose ideas were prominent in the early
development of Christianity, are sufficient to account for the
rise of Christian orientation. On the one hand there was
the Asiatic sun-worship, perhaps specially related to the
veneration of the rising sun in old Persian religion, and
which has left relics in the east of the Turkish empire into
modern years ; Christian sects praying toward the sun, and
Yezidis turning to the east as their kibleh and burying their
dead looking thither.* On the other hand, orientation was
recognized in classic Greek religion, not indeed in slavish
obedience to a uniform law, but as a principle to be worked
out in converse ways. Thus it was an Athenian practice
for the temple to have its entrance east, looking out through
which the divine image stood to behold the rising sun.
This rule it is that Lucian refers to, when he talks of the
delight of gazing toward the loveliest and most longed-for
of the day, of welcoming the sun as he peeps forth, of taking
one's fill of light through the wide-open doors, even as the

1 Ezek. viii. 16 ; Mishna, ' Sukkoth,' v. See Fergusson in Smith's ' Dic-
tionary of the Bible,' s.v. ' Temple.'

* Hyde, ' Veterum Persarum Religionis Historia,' ch. iv. Niebuhr,
' Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien,' vol. i. p. 396. Layard, ' Nineveh,' vol. i.
ch. ix.



ORIENTATION. 427

ancients built their temples looking forth. Nor was the
contrary rule as stated by Vitruvius less plain in meaning ;
the sacred houses of the immortal gods shall be so arranged,
that if no reason prevents and choice is free, the temple and
the statue erected in the cell shall look toward the west, so
that they who approach the altar to sacrifice and vow and
pray may look at once toward the statue and the eastern
sky, the divine figures thus seeming to arise and look upon
them. Altars of the gods were to stand toward the east. 1

Unknown in primitive Christianity, the ceremony of
orientation was developed within its first four centuries. It
became an accepted custom to turn in prayer toward the
east, the mystic region of the Light of the World, the Sun
of Righteousness. Augustine says, ' When we stand at
prayer, we turn to the east, where the heaven arises, not as
though God were only there, and had forsaken all other
parts of the world, but to admonish our mind to turn to a
more excellent nature, that is, to the Lord.' No wonder
that the early Christians were thought to practise in sub-
stance the rite of sun-worship which they practised in form.
Thus Tertullian writes : ' Others indeed with greater truth

and verisimilitude believe the sun to be our God

the suspicion arising from its being known that we pray
toward the region of the east.' Though some of the most
ancient and honoured churches of Christendom stand to
show that orientation was no original law of ecclesiastical
architecture, yet it became dominant in early centuries.
That the author of the ' Apostolical Constitutions ' should
be able to give directions for building churches toward the

east (o O?KOS ecrro) ;rt/i77/ojs, KO.T avanoAas TTpa/u/ivos), just as

Vitruvius had laid down the rule as to the temples of the
gods, is only a part of that assimilation of the church to the
temple which took effect so largely in the scheme of worship.
Of all Christian ceremony, however, it was in the rite of
baptism that orientation took its fullest andmost picturesque

1 Lucian. De Domo, vi. Vitruv. de Architecture, iv. 5. See Welcker, vol. i.
P- 403-



428 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

form. The catechumen was placed with face toward the
west, and then commanded to renounce Satan with gestures
of abhorrence, stretching out his hands against him, or
smiting them together, and blowing or spitting against him
thrice. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his ' Mystagogic Catechism,'
thus depicts the scene : ' Ye first came into the ante-room
of the baptistery, and standing toward the west (TTPOS ra
^w/xas) ye were commanded to put away Satan, stretching

out your hands as though he were present And

why did ye stand toward the west ? It was needful, for
sunset is the type of darkness, and he is darkness and has
his strength in darkness ; therefore symbolically looking
toward the west ye renounce that dark and gloomy ruler.'
Then turning round to the east, the catechumen took up his
allegiance to his new master, Christ. The ceremony and
its significance are clearly set forth by Jerome, thus : ' In
the mysteries [meaning baptism] we first renounce him who
is in the west, and dies to us. with our sins ; and so, turning
to the east, we make a covenant with the Sun of righteous-
ness, promising to be his servants.' 1 This perfect double
rite of east and west, retained in the baptismal ceremony
of the Greek Church, may be seen in Russia to this day.
The orientation of churches and the practice of turning to
the cast as an act of worship, are common to both Greek
and Latin ritual. In our own country they declined from
the Reformation, till at the beginning of the iQth century
they seemed falling out of use ; since then, however, they
have been restored to a certain prominence by the revived
medievalism of our own day. To the student of history, it
is a striking example of the connexion of thought and cere-
mony through the religions of the lower and higher culture,
to see surviving in our midst, with meaning dwindled into



^Augustin. de Serm. Dom. in Monte, ii. 5. Tertullian. Contra Valentin,
iii. ; Apolog. xvi. Constitutions Apostolicz, ii. 57. Cyril. Catech. Mystag.
i. 2. Hieronym. in Amos. vi. 14 ; Bingham, ' Antiquities of Chr. Church,'
book viii. ch. 3, book xi. ch. 7, book xiii. ch. 8. Js M. Neale, ' Eastern
Church,' part i. p. 956 ; Romanoff, ' Greco-Russian Church,' p. 67.



LUSTRATION. 429

symbolism, this ancient solar rite. The influence of the
divine Sun upon his rude and ancient worshippers still
subsists before our eyes as a mechanical force, acting
diamagnetically to adjust the axis of the church and turn
the body of the worshipper.

The last group of rites whose course through religious
history is to be outlined here, takes in the varied dramatic
acts of ceremonial purification of Lustration. With all the
obscurity and intricacy due to age-long modification, the
primitive thought which underlies these ceremonies is still
open to view. It is the transition from practical to symbolic
cleansing, from removal of bodily impurity to deliverance
from invisible, spiritual, and at last moral evil. Our
language follows this ideal movement to its utmost stretch,
where such words as cleansing and purification have passed
from their first material meaning, to signify removal of
ceremonial contamination, legal guilt, and moral sin.
What we thus express in metaphor, the men of the lower
culture began early to act in ceremony, purifying persons
and objects by various prescribed rites, especially by dipping
them in and sprinkling them with water, or fumigating them
with and passing them through fire. It is the plainest proof
of the original practicality of proceedings now passed into
formalism, to point out how far the ceremonial lustrations
still keep their connexion with times of life when real
purification is necessary, how far they still consist in formal
cleansing of the new-born child and the mother, of the man-
slayer who has shed blood, or the mourner who has touched
a corpse. In studying the distribution of the forms of
lustration among the races of the world, while allowing for
the large effect of their transmission from religion to religion,
and from nation to nation, we may judge that their diversity
of detail and purpose scarcely favours a theory of their being
all historically derived from one or even several special
religions of the ancient world. They seem more largely to
exemplify independent working out, in different directions,
of an idea common to mankind at large. This view may



430 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

be justified by surveying lustration through a series ot
typical instances, which show its appearance and character
in savage and barbaric culture, as being an act belonging to
certain well-marked events of human life.

The purification of the new-born child appears among
the lower races in various forms, but perhaps in some par-
ticular instances borrowed from the higher. It should be
noticed that though the naming of the child is often asso-
ciated with its ceremonial cleansing, there is no real con-
nexion between the two rites, beyond their coming due at
the same early time of life. To those who look for the
matter-of-fact origin of such ceremonies, one of the most
suggestive of the accounts available is a simple mention of
the two necessary acts of washing and name-giving, as done
together in mere practical purpose, but not as yet passed
into formal ceremony the Kichtak Islanders, it is remarked,
at birth wash the child, and give it a name. 1 Among the
Yumanas of Brazil, as soon as the child can sit up, it is
sprinkled with a decoction of certain herbs, and receives a
name which has belonged to an ancestor. 2 Among some
Jakun tribes of the Malay Peninsula, as soon as the child
is born it is carried to the nearest stream and washed ; it is
then brought back to the house, the fire is kindled, and
fragrant wood thrown on, over which it is passed several
times. 3 The New Zealanders' infant baptism is no new
practice, and is considered by them an old traditional rite,
but nothing very similar is observed among other branches
of the Polynesian race. Whether independently invented
or not, it was thoroughly worked into the native religious
scheme. The baptism was performed on the eighth day or
earlier, at the side of a stream or elsewhere, by a native
priest who sprinkled water on the child with a branch or
twig ; sometimes the child was immersed. With this lus-
tration it received its name, the priest repeating a list of

1 Billings, ' N. Russia,' p. 175.

2 Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 485.

3 ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 264.



LUSTRATION. 43!

ancestral names till the child chose one for itself by sneez-
ing at it. The ceremony was of the nature of a dedication,
and was accompanied by rhythmical formulas of exhortation.
The future warrior was bidden to flame with anger, to leap
nimbly and ward off the spears, to be angry and bold and
industrious, to work before the dew is off the ground ; the
future housewife was bidden to get food and go for firewood
and weave garments with panting of breath. In after years,
a second sacred sprinkling was performed to admit a lad
into the rank of warriors. It has to be noticed with refer-
ence to the reason of this ceremonial washing, that a new-
born child is in the highest degree tapu, and may only be
touched by a few special persons till the restriction is
removed. 1 In Madagascar, a fire is kept up in the room
for several days, then the child in its best clothes is in due
form carried out of the house and back to its mother, both
times being carefully lifted over the fire, which is made
near the door. 2 In Africa, some of the most noticeable
ceremonies of the class are these. The people of Sarac
wash the child three days after birth with holy water. 3
When a Mandingo child was about a week old its hair was
cut, and the priest, invoking blessings, took it in his arms,
whispered in its ear, spat thrice in its face, and pronounced
its name aloud before the assembled company. 4 In Guinea,
when a child is born, the event is publicly proclaimed, the
new-born babe is brought into the streets, and the headman
of the town or family sprinkles it with water from a basin,
giving it a name and invoking blessings of health and
wealth upon it ; other friends follow the example, till the
child is thoroughly drenched. 8 In these various examples

1 Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 184; Yate, p. 82; Polack, vol. i. p. 51 ;
A. S. Thomson, vol. i. p. 118; Klemm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. iv. p. 304.
See Schirren, ' Wandersagen der Neuseelander,' pp. 58, 183; Shortland,
p. 145.

2 Ellis, ' Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 152.

3 Munzinger, ' Ost-Afrika,' p. 387.

4 Park, ' Travels,' ch. vi.

6 J. L. Wilson, ' Western Africa,' p. 399. See also Bastian, ' Mensch,'



431 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

of lustration of infants, the purifications by fire have es-
pecial importance ethnologically, not because this proceeding
is more natural to the savage mind than that of bathing or
sprinkling with water, but because this latter ceremony may
sometimes have been imitated from Christian baptism. The
fact of savage and barbaric lustration of infants being in
several cases associated with the belief in re-birth of ances-
tral souls seems to mark the rite as belonging to remote
pre-Christian ages. 1

The purification of women at childbirth, &c., is cere-
monially practised by the lower races under circumstances
which do not suggest adoption from more civilized nations.
The seclusion and lustration among North American Indian
tribes have been compared with those of the Levitical law,
but the resemblance is not remarkably close, and belongs
rather to a stage of civilization than to the ordinance of a
particular nation. It is a good case of independent develop-
ment in such customs, that the rite of putting out the fires
and kindling ' new fire ' on the woman's return is common
to the Iroquois and Sioux in North America, 2 and the
Casutos in South Africa. These latter have a well-marked
rite of lustration by sprinkling, performed on girls at
womanhood. 3 The Hottentots considered mother and child
unclean till they had been washed and smeared after the
uncleanly native fashion. 4 Lustrations with water were
usual in West Africa. 5 Tatar tribes in Mongolia used
bathing, while in Siberia the custom of leaping over a fire
answered the purpose of purification. 6 The Mantras of the
Malay Peninsula have made the bathing of the mother after

vol. ii. p. 279 (Watje) ; 'Anthropological Review,' Nov. 1864, p. 243
(Mpongwe) : Barker-Webb and Berthelot, vol. ii. p. 163 (Tenerife).

1 See pp. 5, 437.

- Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 261 ; part iii. p. 243, &c.
Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. v. p. 425. Wilson in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.'
vol. iv. p. 294.

3 Casalis, ' Basutos,' p. 267.

4 Kolben, vol. i. pp. 273, 283.

5 Bosman, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. pp. 423, 527 ; Meiners, vol. ii. pp.
107, 463-

6 Pallas, ' Mongolische Volkerschaften,' vol. i. p. 166, &c. ; Strahlenberg,
' Siberia,' p. 97.



LUSTRATION. 433

childbirth into a ceremonial ordinance. 1 It is so among the
indigenes of India, where both in northern and southern
districts the naming of the child comes into connexion with
the purification of the mother, both ceremonies being per-
formed on the same day. 2 Without extending further this
list of instances, it is sufficiently plain that we have before
us the record of a practical custom becoming consecrated
by traditional habit, and making its way into the range of
religious ceremony.

Much the same may be said of the purification of savage
and barbaric races on occasion of contamination by blood-
shed or funeral. In North America, the Dacotas use the
vapour-bath not only as a remedy, but also for the removal
of ceremonial uncleanness, such as is caused by killing a
person, or touching a dead body. 3 So among the Navajos,
the man who has been deputed to carry a dead body to
burial, holds himself unclean until he has thoroughly washed
himself in water prepared for the purpose by certain cere-
monies. 4 In Madagascar, no one who has attended a
funeral may enter the palace courtyard till he has bathed,
and in all cases there must be an ablution of the mourner's
garments on returning from the grave. 8 Among the Basutos
of South Africa, warriors returning from battle must rid
themselves of the blood they have shed, or the shades of
their victims would pursue them and disturb their sleep.
Therefore they go in procession in full armour to the nearest
stream to wash, and their weapons are washed also. It is
usual in this ceremony for a sorcerer higher up the stream
to put in some magical ingredient, such as he also uses in
the preparation of the holy water which is sprinkled over
the people with a beast's tail at the frequent public purifica-
tions. These Basutos, moreover, use fumigation with burn-
ing wood to purify growing corn, and cattle taken from the

1 Bourien in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. Hi. p. 81.

2 Dalton in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 22 ; Shortt, ibid. vol. iii. p. 375.
8 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 255.

' Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 127.

6 Ellis, ' Madagascar.' vol. i. p. 241 ; see pp. 407, "41 9.



434 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

enemy. Fire serves for purification in cases too trifling to
require sacrifice ; thus when a mother sees her child walk
over a grave, she hastens to call it, makes it stand before
her, and lights a small fire at its feet. 1 The Zulus, whose
horror of a dead body will induce them to cast out and
leave in the woods their sick people, at least strangers,
purify themselves by an ablution after a funeral. It is to be
noticed that these ceremonial practices have come to mean
something distinct from mere cleanliness. Kaffirs who will
purify themselves from ceremonial uncleanness by washing,
are not in the habit of washing themselves or their vessels
for ordinary purposes, and the dogs and the cockroaches
divide between them the duty of cleaning out the milk-
baskets. 2 Mediaeval Tatar tribes, some of whom had con-
scientious scruples against bathing, have found passing
through fire or between two fires a sufficient purification,
and the household stuff of the dead was lustrated in this
latter way. 8

In the organised nations of the semi-civilized and civi-
lized world, where religion shapes itself into elaborate and
systematic schemes, the practices of lustration familiar to
the lower culture now become part of stringent ceremonial
systems. It seems to be at this stage of their existence
that they often take up in addition to their earlier cere-
monial significance an ethical meaning, absent or all but
absent from them at their first appearance above the reli-
gious horizon. This will be made evident by glancing over
the ordinances of lustration in the great national religions
of history. It will be well to notice first the usages of two
semi-civilized nations of America, which though they have
scarcely produced practical effect on civilization at large,
give valuable illustration of a transition period in culture,
leaving apart the obscure question of their special civiliza-

1 Casalis, ' Basutos,' p. 258.

* Grout, 'Zulu-land,' p. 147; Backhouse, 'Mauritius and S. Africa,'
pp. 213, 225.

3 Bastian, ' Mcnsch,' vol. iii. p. 75 ; Rubruquis, in Pinkerton, vol. vii.
p. 82 ; Piano Carpini in Hakluyt, vol. i. p. 37.



LUSTRATION. 435

tion having been influenced in early or late times from the
Old World.

In the religion of Peru, lustration is well-marked and
characteristic. On the day of birth, the water in which the
child has been washed was poured into a hole in the ground,
charms being repeated by a wizard or priest ; an excellent
instance of the ceremonial washing away of evil influences.
The naming of the child was also more or less generally
accompanied with ceremonial washing, as in districts where
at two years old it was weaned, baptized, had its hair cere-
monially cut with a stone knife, and received its child-
name ; Peruvian Indians still cut off a lock of the child's
hair at its baptism. Moreover, the significance of lustra-
tion as removing guilt is plainly recorded in ancient Peru ;
after confession of guilt, an Inca bathed in a neighbouring
river and repeated this formula, ' O thou River, receive the
sins I have this day confessed unto the Sun, carry them
down to the sea, and let them never more appear.' 1 In
old Mexico, the first act of ceremonial lustration took place
at birth. The nurse washed the infant in the name of the
water-goddess, to remove the impurity of its birth, to
cleanse its heart and give it a good and perfect life ; then
blowing on water in her right hand she washed it again,
warning it of forthcoming trials and miseries and labours,
and praying the invisible Deity to descend upon the water,
to cleanse the child from sin and foulness, and to deliver it
from misfortune. The second act took place some four
days later, unless the astrologers postponed it. At a festive
gathering, amid fires kept alight from the first ceremony,
the nurse undressed the child sent by the gods into this sad
and doleful world, bade it receive the life-giving water, and
washed it, driving out evil from each limb and offering to
the deities appointed prayers for virtue and blessing. It

1 Rivero and Tschudi, 'Peruvian Antiquities,' p. 180; J. G. Miiller,
' Amer. Urrelig.' p. 389; Acosta, ' Ind. Occ.' v. c. 25; Brinton, p. 126.
Sec account of the rite of driving out sicknesses and evils into the rivers,
Rites and Laws of Incas,' tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, p. 22.



436 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

was then that the toy instruments of war or craft or house-
hold labour were placed in the boy's or girl's hand (a custom
singularly corresponding with one usual in China), and the
other children, instructed by their parents, gave the new-
comer its child-name, here again to be replaced by another
at manhood or womanhood. There is nothing unlikely in
the statement that the child was also passed four times
through the fire, but the authority this is given on is not
sufficient. The religious character of ablution is well
shown in Mexico by its forming part of the daily service
of the priests. Aztec life ended as it had begun, with
ceremonial lustration ; it was one of the funeral ceremonies
to sprinkle the head of the corpse with the lustral water of
this life. 1

Among the nations of East Asia, and across the more civi-
lized Turanian districts of Central Asia, ceremonial lustra-
tion comes frequently into notice ; but it would often bring
in difficult points of ethnography to attempt a general judg-
ment how far these may be native local rites, and how far cere-
monies adopted from foreign religious systems. As examples
may be mentioned in Japan the sprinkling and naming of
the child at a month old, and other lustrations connected
with worship ; * in China the religious ceremony at the first
washing of the three days' old infant, the lifting of the bride
over burning coals, the sprinkling of holy-water over sacri-
fices and rooms and on the mourners after a funeral ; 3 in
Burma the purification of the mother by fire, and the annual
sprinkling-festival. 4 Within the range of Buddhism in its
Lamaist form, we find such instances as the Tibetan and



1 Sahagun, ' Nueva Espafia,' lib. vi. ; Torquemada, ' Monarquia Indiana,'
lib. xii. ; Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 39. 86, &c. ; Humboldt, ' Vues dcs Cor-
dilleres,' Mendoza Cod. ; J. C. Miiller, p. 652.

8 Siebold, ' Nippon,' v. p. 22 ; Kempfer, ' Japan,' ch. xiii. in Pinkerton,
vol. vii.

3 Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 120, vol. ii. p. 273. Davis, vol. i. p.
269.

4 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 247 ; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 106 ; Symes
in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 435.



LUSTRATION. 437

Mongol lustration of the child a few days after birth, the
lama blessing the water and immersing the child thrice, and
giving its name ; the Buraet consecration by threefold wash-
ing ; the Tibetan ceremony where the mourners returning
from the funeral stand before the fire, wash their hands with
warm water over the hot coals, and fumigate themselves
thrice with proper formulas. 1 With this infant baptism of
Tibetans and Mongols may be compared the rite of their
ethnological kinsfolk in Europe. The Lapps in their semi-
Christianized state had a form of baptism, in which a new
name, that of the deceased ancestor who would live again
in the child, as the mother was spiritually informed in a
dream, was given with a threefold sprinkling and washing
with warm water where mystic alder-twigs were put. This
ceremony, though called by the Scandinavian name of
' laugo ' or bath, was distinct from the Christian baptism
to which the Lapps also conformed. 2 The natural ethno-
graphic explanation of these two baptismal ceremonies
existing together in Northern Europe, is that Christianity
had brought in a new rite, without displacing a previous
native one.

Other Asiatic districts show lustration in more compact
and characteristic religious developments. The Brahman
leads a life marked by recurring ceremonial purification,
from the time when his first appearance in the world brings
uncleanness on the household, requiring ablution and clean
garments to remove it, and thenceforth through his years
from youth to old age, where bathing is a main part of the
long minute ceremonial of daily worship, and further wash-
ings and aspersions enter into more solemn religious acts,
till at last the day comes when his kinsfolk, on their way
home from his funeral, cleanse themselves by a final bath
from their contamination by his remains. For the means

1 Koppen, ' Religion des Buddha,' vol. ii. p. 320 ; Bastian, ' Psychologic,'
pp. 151, 211 ; ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 499.

2 Leems, ' Finnmarkens Lapper.' Copenhagen, c. xiv., xxii., and Jessen,
c. xiv. ; Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 483 ; Klcmm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. iii. p. 77.



438 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

of some of his multifarious lustrations the Hindu has re-
course to the sacred cow, but his more frequent medium of
removing uncleanness of body and soul is water, the divine
waters to which he prays, ' Take away, O Waters, whatso-
ever is wicked in me, what I have done by violence or curse,
and untruth ! ' l The Parsi religion prescribes a system of
lustrations which well shows its common origin with that
of Hinduism by its similar use of cow's urine and of water.
Bathing or sprinkling with water, or applications of ' nirang '
washed off with water, form part of the daily religious rites,
as well as of such special ceremonies as the naming of the
new-born child, the putting on of the sacred cord, the puri-
fication of the mother after childbirth, the purification of
him who has touched a corpse, when the unclean demon,
driven by sprinkling of the good water from the top of the
head and from limb to limb, comes forth at the left toe and
departs like a fly to the evil region of the north. It is,
perhaps, the influence of this ancestral religion, even more
than the actual laws of Islam, that makes the modern
Persian so striking an example of the way in which cere-
mony may override reality. It is rather in form than in
fact that his cleanliness is next to godliness. He carries
the principle of removing legal uncleanness by ablution so
far, that a holy man will wash his eyes when they have been
polluted by the sight of an infidel. He will carry about a
water-pot with a long spout for his ablutions, yet he depopu-
lates the land by his neglect of the simplest sanitary rules,
and he may be seen by the side of the little tank where
scores of people have been in before him, obliged to clear
with his hand a space in the foul scum on the water, before
he plunges in to obtain ceremonial purity.*

1 Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. pp. 96, 246, 337 ; Colebrooke, ' Essays/
vol. ii. Wuttke, ' Gesch. des Heidenthums,' vol. ii. p. 378. ' Rig-Veda,' i.

22, 2 3 .

* Avesta, Vendidad, v.-xii. ; Lord, in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 570 ;
Naoroji, ' Parsee Religion ' ; Polak, ' Persien,' vol. i. p. 355, &c., vol. ii.
p. 271. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 125.



LUSTRATION. 439

Over against the Aryan rites of lustration in the religions
of Asia, may be set the well-known types in the religions of
classic Europe. At the Greek amphidromia, when the child
was about a week old, the women who had assisted at the
birth washed their hands, and afterwards the child was
carried round the fire by the nurse, and received its name ;
the Roman child received its praenomen with a lustration at
about the same age, and the custom is recorded of the nurse
touching its lips and forehead with spittle. To wash before
an act of worship was a ceremony handed down by Greek and
Roman ritual through the classic ages : Ka0ap<u? 81 Spoo-ois,
a<t>v$pa.va.fj*voi <rrxVr vaovs eo lavatum, ut sacrificem. The
holy-water mingled with salt, the holy-water vessel at
the temple entrance, the brush to sprinkle the worshippers,
all belong to classic antiquity. Romans, their flocks and
herds and their fields, were purified from disease and other
ill by lustrations which show perfectly the equivalent nature
of water and fire as means of purification ; the passing of
flocks and shepherds through fires, the sprinkling water with
laurel branches, the fumigating with fragrant boughs and
herbs and sulphur, formed part of the rustic rites of the
Palilia. Bloodshed demanded the lustral ceremony. Hektor
fears to pour with unwashen hands the libation of dark
wine, nor may he pray bespattered with gore to cloud-
wrapped Zeus ; .<Eneas may not touch the household gods
till cleansed from slaughter by the living stream. It was
with far changed thought that Ovid wrote his famous reproof
of his too-easy countrymen, who fancied that water could
indeed wash off the crime of blood :

' Ah nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis
Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua.'

Thus, too, the mourner must be cleansed by lustration
from the contaminating presence of death. At the door of
the Greek house of mourning was set the water- vessel, that
those who had been within might sprinkle themselves and
be clean ; while the mourners returning from a Roman



440 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

funeral, aspersed with water and stepping over fire, were by
this double process made pure. 1

The ordinances .of purification in the Lcvitical law relate
especially to the removal of legal uncleanness connected
with childbirth, death, and other pollutions. Washing was
prescribed for such purposes, and also sprinkling with
water of separation, water mingled with the ashes of the red
heifer. Ablution formed part of the consecration of priests,
and without it they might not serve at the altar nor enter
the tabernacle. In the later times of Jewish national history,
perhaps through intercourse with nations whose lustrations
entered more into the daily routine of life, ceremonial wash-
ings were multiplied. It seems also that in this period
must be dated the ceremony which in after ages has held so
great a place in the religion of the world, their rite of
baptism of proselytes. 2 The Moslem lustrations are ablu-
tions with water, or in default with dust or sand, performed
partially before prayer, and totally on special days or to
remove special uncleanness. They are strictly religious
acts, belonging in principle to prevalent usage of Oriental
religion ; and their details, whether invented or adopted as
they stand in Islam, are not carried down from Judaism or
.Christianity. 8 The rites of lustration which have held and
hold their places within the pale of Christianity are in well-
marked historical connexion with Jewish and Gentile ritual.
Purification by fire has only appeared as an actual ceremony



1 Details in Smith's ' Die. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.' and Pauly, ' Real-
Encyclopcdie,' s.v. ' amphidromia,' ' lustratio,' ' sacrificium,' ' funus ' ;
Meiners, ' Gesch. dcr Religionen,' book vii. ; Lomeyer, ' De Veterum Gen-
tilium Lustrationibus ' ; Montfaucon, ' L'Antiquite Expliquee,' &c. Special
passages ; Homer, II. vi. 266 ; Eurip. Ion. 96 ; Theocrit. xxiv. 95 ; Virg.
JEn. ii. 719; Plaut. Aulular. iii. 6; Pers. Sat. ii. 31 ; Ovid. Fast. i. 669,
ii. 45, iv. 7Z7 ; Festus, s.v. ' aqua et ignis,' &c. The obscure subject of
lustration in the mysteries is here left untouched.

* Ex. xxix. 4, xxx. 1 8, xl. 12 ; Lev. viii. 6, xiv. 8, xv. 5, xxii. 6 ; Numb,
xix. &c. ; Lightfoot in ' Works,' vol. xi. ; Browne in Smith's ' Die. of the
Bible,' s.v. ' baptism ; ' Calmet, ' Die.' &c.

3 Reland, ' De Religione Mohammedanica ; ' Lane, ' Modern Eg.' vol. i.
p. 98, &c.



LUSTRATION. 44!

among some little-known Christian sects, and in the Euro-
pean folklore custom of passing children through or over
fire, if indeed we can be sure that this rite is lustral and
not sacrificial. 1 The usual medium of purification is water.
Holy-water is in full use through the Greek and Roman
churches. It blesses the worshipper as he enters the temple,
it cures disease, it averts sorcery from man and beast, it
drives demons from the possessed, it stops the spirit-writer's
pen, it drives the spirit-moved table it is sprinkled upon to
dash itself frantically against the wall ; at least these are
among the powers attributed to it, and some of the most
striking of them have been lately vouched for by papal
sanction. This lustration with holy- water so exactly con-
tinues the ancient classic rite, that its apologists are apt to
explain the correspondence by arguing that Satan stole it
for his own wicked ends.* Catholic ritual follows ancient
sacrificial usage in the priest's ceremonial washing of hands
before mass. The priest's touching with his spittle the
ears and nostrils of the infant or catechumen, saying,
' Ephphatha,' is obviously connected with passages in the
Gospels ; its adoption as a baptismal ceremony has been
compared, perhaps justly, with the classical lustration by
spittle. 3 Finally, it has but to be said that ceremonial
purification as a Christian act centres in baptism by water,
that symbol of initiation of the convert which history traces
from the Jewish rite to that of John the Baptist, and thence
to the Christian ordinance. Through later ages adult bap-
tism carries on the Jewish ceremony of the admission of
the proselyte, while infant baptism combines this with the
lustration of the new-born infant. Passing through a range
of meaning such as separates the sacrament of the Roman

1 Bingham, ' Antiquities of Christian Church," book xi. ch. 2. Grimm,
' Deutsche Mythologie,' p. 592 ; Leslie, ' Early Races of Scotland,' vol. i.
p. 113 ; Pennant, in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 383.

2 Rituale Romanum ; Gaume, ' L'Eau Be'nite ; ' Middleton, ' Letter from
Rome,' Sec.

3 Rituale Romanum. Bingham, book x. ch. 2, book xv. ch. 3. See
Mark vii. 34, viii. 23 ; John ix. 6.



442 RITES AND CEREMONIES.

centurion from the sacrament of the Roman cardinal, becom-
ing to some a solemn symbol of new life and faith, to some
an act in itself of supernatural efficacy, the rite of baptism
has remained almost throughout the Christian world the
outward sign of the Christian profession.

In considering the present group of religious ceremonies,
their manifestations in the religions of the higher nations
have been but scantily outlined in comparison with their
rudimentary forms in the lower culture. Yet this reversal
of the proportions due to practical importance in no way
invalidates, but rather aids, the ethnographic lessons to be
drawn by tracing their course in history. Through their
varied phases of survival, modification, and succession, they
have each in its own way brought to view the threads of
continuity which connect the faiths of the lower with the
faiths of the higher world ; they have shown how hardly
the civilized man can understand the religious rites even of
his own land without knowledge of the meaning, often the
widely unlike meaning, which they bore to men of distant
ages and countries, representatives of grades of culture far
different from his.