Read Ebook: Psyche's task by Frazer James George

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From this statement it appears that a man and his wife's mother are not the only persons who are bound to avoid each other in society; the same rule of social avoidance is incumbent on a man and his son's wife, and on many other persons of opposite sex who are connected with each other by marriage; and in regard to all such persons it is held that any intimate relationship between them would be incestuous. Hence we see, what is important to bear in mind, that the rule of social avoidance incumbent on a man and his wife's mother is by no means solitary of its kind, and cannot be considered apart from a large number of similar rules of avoidance observed between other persons. The same large extension of the rule appears in the customs of the Batamba, a Bantu tribe of Busoga, a country on the north side of the Lake Victoria Nyanza. A Catholic missionary, who has laboured among the Batamba for nine years, describes their practice in this matter as follows:--

From the foregoing account it appears that among the Batamba the rules of social avoidance are observed between blood-relations of opposite sexes, such as brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews, as well as between connexions by marriage. This is a further extension of the rule of social avoidance which it is important to bear in mind. We shall recur to it presently. For our present purpose it deserves also to be noticed that breaches of the custom are believed to be punished by a disease of trembling or shivering, which, though it probably springs purely from the imagination of the culprits, nevertheless appears to be always fatal. Further, we learn that the mere apprehension of this disease acts as a most efficient check upon improper relations between persons who are connected with each other by blood or marriage.

Among the Akamba, a Bantu tribe of British East Africa, "if a man meets his mother-in-law in the road they both hide their faces and pass by in the bush on opposite sides of the path. If a man did not observe this custom and at any time wanted to marry another wife, it would prove a serious stigma, and parents would have nothing to do with him. Moreover, if a wife heard that her husband had stopped and spoken to her mother in the road, she would leave him. If a man has business he wishes to discuss with his mother-in-law, he goes to her hut at night, and she will talk to him from behind the partition in the hut.... If a girl of the age of puberty meets her father in the road, she hides as he passes, nor can she ever go and sit near him in the village until the day comes when he tells her that it has been arranged for her to marry a certain man. After marriage she does not avoid her father in any way." Thus among the Akamba a man must avoid his own marriageable, but unmarried, daughter exactly as he avoids his wife's mother; but the custom of avoidance ceases when his daughter marries. This extension of the rule to a man's own daughter, and its limitation to the time during which the girl is nubile but single, are most significant, and point plainly to a fear of improper relations between father and daughter. To that point we shall return shortly.

Among the Bakerewe, a Bantu people inhabiting a large and fertile island in Lake Victoria Nyanza, "the wife, whether the first or the last , must always belong to a family other than that of the husband, for marriages are not contracted between relations. Never in any case will the new household establish itself in the immediate neighbourhood of the wife's parents. The reason is that the son-in-law and his mother-in-law , according to their customs, may not see each other nor look upon each other; hence in order not to run the risk of breaking a rule to which everybody attaches grave importance, they go as far away as possible." Among some tribes of Eastern Africa which formerly acknowledged the suzerainty of the sultan of Zanzibar, before a young couple had children they might meet neither their father-in-law nor their mother-in-law. To avoid them they must make a long roundabout. But if they could not do that, they must throw themselves on the ground and hide their faces till the father-in-law or mother-in-law had passed by.

Among the Anyanja, a Bantu people of British Central Africa, "a man used never to speak to his mother-in-law till after the birth of his first son. Neither a man nor his wife will eat in company of their mother or father-in-law until after birth of a child. If a man sees his mother-in-law eat, he has insulted her and is expected to pay damages. If a man meets his mother-in-law coming along the road and does not recognise her, she will fall down on the ground as a sign, when he will run away. In the same way a father-in-law will signal to his daughter-in-law; the whole idea being that they are unworthy to be noticed till they have proved that they can beget children." However, if a wife should prove barren for three years, the rules of avoidance between the young couple and their parents-in-law cease to be observed. Hence the custom of avoidance among these people is associated in some way with the wife's fertility. So among the Awemba, a Bantu tribe of Northern Rhodesia, "if a young man sees his mother-in-law coming along the path, he must retreat into the bush and make way for her, or if she suddenly comes upon him he must keep his eyes fixed on the ground, and only after a child is born may they converse together." Among the Angoni, another Bantu tribe of British Central Africa, it would be a gross breach of etiquette if a man were to enter his son-in-law's house; he may come within ten paces of the door, but no nearer. A woman may not even approach her son-in-law's house, and she is never allowed to speak to him. Should they meet accidentally on a path, the son-in-law gives way and makes a circuit to avoid encountering his mother-in-law face to face. Here then we see that a man avoids his son-in-law as well as his mother-in-law, though not so strictly.

Among the Thonga, a Bantu tribe about Delagoa Bay, when a man meets his mother-in-law or her sister on the road, he steps out of the road into the forest on the right hand side and sits down. She does the same. Then they salute each other in the usual way by clapping their hands. After that they may talk to each other. When a man is in a hut, his mother-in-law dare not enter it, but must sit down outside without seeing him. So seated she may salute him, "Good morning, son of So-and-so." But she would not dare to pronounce his name. However, when a man has been married many years, his mother-in-law has less fear of him, and will even enter the hut where he is and speak to him. But among the Thonga the woman whom a man is bound by custom to avoid most rigidly is not his wife's mother, but the wife of his wife's brother. If the two meet on a path, they carefully avoid each other; he will step out of the way and she will hurry on, while her companions, if she has any, will stop and chat with him. She will not enter the same boat with him, if she can help it, to cross a river. She will not eat out of the same dish. If he speaks to her, it is with constraint and embarrassment. He will not enter her hut, but will crouch at the door and address her in a voice trembling with emotion. Should there be no one else to bring him food, she will do it reluctantly, watching his hut and putting the food inside the door when he is absent. It is not that they dislike each other, but that they feel a mutual, a mysterious fear. However, among the Thonga, the rules of avoidance between connexions by marriage decrease in severity as time passes. The strained relations between a man and his wife's mother in particular become easier. He begins to call her "Mother" and she calls him "Son." This change even goes so far that in some cases the man may go and dwell in the village of his wife's parents, especially if he has children and the children are grown up. Again, among the Ovambo, a Bantu people of German South-West Africa, a man may not look at his future mother-in-law while he talks with her, but is bound to keep his eyes steadily fixed on the ground. In some cases the avoidance is even more stringent; if the two meet unexpectedly, they separate at once. But after the marriage has been celebrated, the social intercourse between mother-in-law and son-in-law becomes easier on both sides.

Thus far our examples of ceremonial avoidance between mother-in-law and son-in-law have been drawn from Bantu tribes. But in Africa the custom, though apparently most prevalent and most strongly marked among peoples of the great Bantu stock, is not confined to them. Among the Masai of British East Africa, "mothers-in-law and their sons-in-law must avoid one another as much as possible; and if a son-in-law enters his mother-in-law's hut she must retire into the inner compartment and sit on the bed, whilst he remains in the outer compartment; they may then talk. Own brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law must also avoid one another, though this rule does not apply to half-brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law." So, too, among the Bogos, a tribe on the outskirts of Abyssinia, a man never sees the face of his mother-in-law and never pronounces her name; the two take care not to meet. Among the Donaglas a husband after marriage "lives in his wife's house for a year, without being allowed to see his mother-in-law, with whom he enters into relations only on the birth of his first son." In Darfur, when a youth has been betrothed to a girl, however intimate he may have been with her parents before, he ceases to see them until the ceremony has taken place, and even avoids them in the street. They, on their part, hide their faces, if they happen to meet him unexpectedly.

To pass now from Africa to other parts of the world, among the Looboos, a primitive tribe in the tropical forests of Sumatra, custom forbids a woman to be in her father-in-law's company and a man to be in his mother-in-law's society. For example, if a man meets his daughter-in-law, he should cross over to the other side of the road to let her pass as far as possible from him; but if the way is too narrow, he takes care in time to get out of it. But no such reserve is prescribed between a father-in-law and his son-in-law, or between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law. Among the Bukaua, a Melanesian tribe of German New Guinea, the rules of avoidance between persons connected by marriage are very stringent; they may not touch each other or mention each other's names. But contrary to the usual practice the avoidance seems to be quite as strict between persons of the same sex as between males and females. At least the writer who reports the custom illustrates it chiefly by the etiquette which is observed between a man and his daughter's husband. When a man eats in presence of his son-in-law, he veils his face; but if nevertheless his son-in-law should see his open mouth, the father-in-law is so ashamed that he runs away into the wood. If he gives his son-in-law anything, such as betel or tobacco, he will never put it in his hand, but pours it on a leaf, and the son-in-law fetches it away. If father-in-law and son-in-law both take part in a wild boar hunt, the son-in-law will abstain from seizing or binding the boar, lest he should chance to touch his father-in-law. If, however, through any accident their hands or backs should come into contact, the father-in-law is extremely horrified, and a dog must be at once killed, which he gives to his son-in-law for the purpose of wiping out the stain on his honour. If the two should ever fall out about anything, the son-in-law will leave the village and his wife, and will stay away in some other place till his father-in-law, for his daughter's sake, calls him back. A man in like manner will never touch his sister-in-law.

Among the low savages of the Californian peninsula a man was not allowed for some time to look into the face of his mother-in-law or of his wife's other near relations; when these women were present he had to step aside or hide himself. Among the Indians of the Isla del Malhado in Florida a father-in-law and mother-in-law might not enter the house of their son-in-law, and he on his side might not appear before his father-in-law and his relations. If they met by accident they had to go apart to the distance of a bowshot, holding their heads down and their eyes turned to the earth. But a woman was free to converse with the father and mother of her husband. Among the Indians of Yucatan, if a betrothed man saw his future father-in-law or mother-in-law at a distance, he turned away as quickly as possible, believing that a meeting with them would prevent him from begetting children. Among the Arawaks of British Guiana a man may never see the face of his wife's mother. If she is in the house with him, they must be separated by a screen or partition-wall; if she travels with him in a canoe, she steps in first, in order that she may turn her back to him. Among the Caribs "the women never quit their father's house, and in that they have an advantage over their husbands in as much as they may talk to all sorts of people, whereas the husband dare not converse with his wife's relations, unless he is dispensed from this observance either by their tender age or by their intoxication. They shun meeting them and make great circuits for that purpose. If they are surprised in a place where they cannot help meeting, the person addressed turns his face another way so as not to be obliged to see the person, whose voice he is compelled to hear." Among the Araucanian Indians of Chili a man's mother-in-law refuses to speak to or even to look at him during the marriage festivity, and "the point of honour is, in some instances, carried so far, that for years after the marriage the mother never addresses her son-in-law face to face; though with her back turned, or with the interposition of a fence or a partition, she will converse with him freely."

It would be easy to multiply examples of similar customs of avoidance between persons closely connected by marriage, but the foregoing may serve as specimens. Now in order to determine the meaning of such customs it is very important to observe that similar customs of avoidance are practised in some tribes not merely between persons connected with each other by marriage, but also between the nearest blood relations of different sexes, namely, between parents and children and between brothers and sisters; and the customs are so alike that it seems difficult or impossible to separate them and to offer one explanation of the avoidance of connexions by marriage and another different explanation of the avoidance of blood relations. Yet this is what is done by some who attempt to explain the customs of avoidance; or rather they confine their attention wholly to connexions by marriage, or even to mothers-in-law alone, while they completely ignore blood relations, although in point of fact it is the avoidance of blood relations which seems to furnish the key to the problem of such avoidances in general. The true explanation of all such customs of avoidance appears to be, as I have already indicated, that they are precautions designed to remove the temptation to sexual intercourse between persons whose marriage union is for any reason repugnant to the moral sense of the community. This explanation, while it has been rejected by theorists at home, has been adopted by some of the best observers of savage life, whose opinion is entitled to carry the greatest weight.

That a fear of improper intimacy even between the nearest blood relations is not baseless among races of a lower culture seems proved by the testimony of a Dutch missionary in regard to the Battas or Bataks of Sumatra, a people who have attained to a fairly high degree of barbaric civilization. The Battas "observe certain rules of avoidance in regard to near relations by blood or marriage; and we are informed that such avoidance springs not from the strictness but from the looseness of their moral practice. A Batta, it is said, assumes that a solitary meeting of a man with a woman leads to an improper intimacy between them. But at the same time he believes that incest or the sexual intercourse of near relations excites the anger of the gods and entails calamities of all sorts. Hence near relations are obliged to avoid each other lest they should succumb to temptation. A Batta, for example, would think it shocking were a brother to escort his sister to an evening party. Even in the presence of others a Batta brother and sister feel embarrassed. If one of them comes into the house, the other will go away. Further, a man may never be alone in the house with his daughter, nor a mother with her son. A man may never speak to his mother-in-law nor a woman to her father-in-law. The Dutch missionary who reports these customs adds that he is sorry to say that from what he knows of the Battas he believes the maintenance of most of these rules to be very necessary. For the same reason, he tells us, as soon as Batta lads have reached the age of puberty they are no longer allowed to sleep in the family house but are sent away to pass the night in a separate building ; and similarly as soon as a man loses his wife by death he is excluded from the house."

In like manner among the Melanesians of the Banks' Islands and the New Hebrides a man must not only avoid his mother-in-law; from the time when he reaches or approaches puberty and has begun to wear clothes instead of running about naked, he must avoid his mother and sisters, and he may no longer live in the same house with them; he takes up his quarters in the clubhouse of the unmarried males, where he now regularly eats and sleeps. He may go to his father's house to ask for food, but if his sister is within he must go away before he eats; if she is not there, he may sit down near the door and eat. If by chance brother and sister meet in the path, she runs away or hides. If a boy, walking on the sands, perceives footprints which he knows to be those of his sister, he will not follow them, nor will she follow his. This mutual avoidance lasts through life. Not only must he avoid the persons of his sisters, but he may not pronounce their names or even use a common word which happens to form part of any one of their names. In like manner his sisters eschew the use of his name and of all words which form part of it. Strict, too, is a boy's reserve towards his mother from the time when he begins to wear clothes, and the reserve increases as he grows to manhood. It is greater on her side than on his. He may go to the house and ask for food and his mother may bring it out for him, but she will not give it to him; she puts it down for him to take. If she calls to him to come, she speaks to him in the plural, in a more distant manner; "Come ye," she says, not "Come thou." If they talk together she sits at a little distance and turns away, for she is shy of her grown-up son. "The meaning of all this," as Dr. Codrington observes, "is obvious." When a Melanesian man of the Banks' Islands marries, he is bound in like manner to avoid his mother-in-law. "The rules of avoidance are very strict and minute. As regards the avoidance of the person, a man will not come near his wife's mother; the avoidance is mutual; if the two chance to meet in a path, the woman will step out of it and stand with her back turned till he has gone by, or perhaps if it be more convenient he will move out of the way. At Vanua Lava, in Port Patteson, a man would not follow his mother-in-law along the beach, nor she him, until the tide had washed out the footsteps of the first traveller from the sand. At the same time a man and his mother-in-law will talk at a distance."

It seems obvious that these Melanesian customs of avoidance are the same, and must be explained in the same way whether the woman whom a man shuns is his wife's mother or his own mother or his sister. Now it is highly significant that just as among the Akamba of East Africa the mutual avoidance of father and daughter only begins when the girl has reached puberty, so among the Melanesians the mutual avoidance of a boy on the one side and of his mother and sisters on the other only begins when the boy has reached or approached puberty. Thus in both peoples the avoidance between the nearest blood relations only commences at the dangerous age when sexual connexion on both sides begins to be possible. It seems difficult, therefore, to evade the conclusion that the mutual avoidance is adopted for no other reason than to diminish as far as possible the chances of sexual unions which public opinion condemns as incestuous. But if that is the reason why a young Melanesian boy, on the verge of puberty, avoids his own mother and sisters, it is natural and almost necessary to infer that it is the same reason which leads him, as a full-grown and married man, to eschew the company of his wife's mother.

"These restrictions, which custom and tradition have instituted within the family, find expression also in the behaviour of the members of families toward each other. The following persons, namely, have to be treated with respect--the daughters by their father, the sons by their mother, the brothers by their sisters. In presence of such relations, as in the presence of a chief, you may not stand, but must sit down; if you are obliged on narrow paths to pass by one of them you must first obtain permission and then do it in a stooping or creeping posture. You allow them everywhere to go in front; you also avoid to drink out of the vessel which they have just used; you do not touch them, but keep always at a certain distance from them; the head especially is deemed sacred."

In all these cases the custom of mutual avoidance is observed by persons of opposite sex who, though physically capable of sexual union, are forbidden by tradition and public opinion to have any such commerce with each other. Thus far the blood relations whom a man is forbidden to marry and compelled to avoid, are his own mother, his own daughter, and his own sisters. But to this list some people add a man's female cousins or at least certain of them; for many races draw a sharp line of distinction between cousins according as they are children of two brothers or of two sisters or of a brother and a sister, and while they permit or even prefer marriage with certain cousins, they absolutely forbid marriage with certain others. Now, it is highly significant that some tribes which forbid a man to marry certain of his cousins also compel him to adopt towards them the same attitude of social reserve which in the same or other tribes a man is obliged to observe towards his wife's mother, his own mother, and his own sisters, all of whom in like manner he is forbidden to marry. Thus among the tribes in the central part of New Ireland a male and a female cousin, the children of a brother and a sister respectively, are most strictly forbidden by custom to marry each other; indeed this prohibition is described as the most stringent of all; the usual saying in regard to such relations is, "The cousin is holy" . Now, in these tribes a man is not merely forbidden to marry his female cousin, the daughter of his father's sister or of his mother's brother; he must also avoid her socially, just as in other tribes a man must avoid his wife's mother, his own mother, his own daughter, and his own sisters. The cousins may not approach each other, they may not shake hands or even touch each other, they may not give each other presents, they may not mention each other's names; but they are allowed to speak to each other at a distance of some paces. These rules of avoidance, these social barriers erected between cousins, the children of a brother and a sister respectively, are interpreted most naturally and simply as precautions intended to obviate the danger of a criminal intercourse between persons whose sexual union would be regarded by public opinion with deep displeasure. Indeed the Catholic missionary, to whom we are indebted for the information, assumes this interpretation of the rules as if it were too obvious to call for serious discussion. He says that all the customs of avoidance "are observed as outward symbols of this prohibition of marriage"; and he adds that "were the outward sign of the prohibition of marriage, to which the natives cleave with genuine obstinacy, abolished or even weakened, there would be an immediate danger of the natives contracting such marriages." It seems difficult for a rational man to draw any other inference. If any confirmation were needed, it would be furnished by the fact that among these tribes of New Ireland brothers and sisters are obliged to observe precisely the same rules of mutual avoidance, and that incest between brother and sister is a crime which is punished with hanging; they may not come near each other, they may not shake hands, they may not touch each other, they may not give each other presents; but they are allowed to speak to each other at a distance of some paces. And the penalty for incest with a daughter is also death by hanging.

Amongst the Baganda of Central Africa in like manner a man was forbidden under pain of death to marry or have sexual intercourse with his cousin, the daughter either of his father's sister or of his mother's brother; and such cousins might not approach each other, nor hand each other anything, nor enter the same house, nor eat out of the same dish. Were cousins to break these rules of social avoidance, in other words, if they were to approach each other or hand each other anything, it was believed that they would fall ill, that their hands would tremble, and that they would be unfit for any work. Here, again, the prohibition of social intercourse was in all probability merely a precaution against sexual intercourse, for which the penalty was death. And the same may be said of the similar custom of avoidance which among these same Baganda a man had to observe towards his wife's mother. "No man might see his mother-in-law, or speak face to face with her; she covered her face, if she passed her son-in-law, and he gave her the path and made a detour, if he saw her coming. If she was in the house, he might not enter, but he was allowed to speak to her from a distance. This was said to be because he had seen her daughter's nakedness. If a son-in-law accidentally saw his mother-in-law's breasts, he sent her a barkcloth in compensation, to cover herself, lest some illness, such as tremor, should come upon him. The punishment for incest was death; no member of a clan would shield a person guilty thereof; the offender was disowned by the clan, tried by the chief of the district, and put to death."

The prohibition of marriage with certain cousins appears to be widespread among African peoples of the Bantu stock. Thus in regard to the Bantus of South Africa we read that "every man of a coast tribe regarded himself as the protector of those females whom we would call his cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and so forth, on the father's side, while some had a similar feeling towards the same relatives on the mother's side as well, and classified them all as sisters. Immorality with one of them would have been considered incestuous, something horrible, something unutterably disgraceful. Of old it was punished by the death of the male, and even now a heavy fine is inflicted upon him, while the guilt of the female must be atoned by a sacrifice performed with due ceremony by the tribal priest, or it is believed a curse will rest upon her and her issue.... In contrast to this prohibition the native of the interior almost as a rule married the daughter of his father's brother, in order, as he said, to keep property from being lost to his family. This custom more than anything else created a disgust and contempt for them by the people of the coast, who term such intermarriages the union of dogs, and attribute to them the insanity and idiocy which in recent times has become prevalent among the inland tribes."

Thus the prohibition of marriage between cousins, and the rules of ceremonial avoidance observed in some tribes between persons who stand in that relationship to each other, appear both to spring from a belief, right or wrong, in the injurious effects of such unions and from a desire to avoid them. The mutual avoidance of the cousins is merely a precaution to prevent a closer and more criminal intimacy between them. If that is so, it furnishes a confirmation of the view that all the customs of ceremonial avoidance between blood relations or connexions by marriage of opposite sexes are based simply on a fear of incest.

The theory is perhaps confirmed by the observation that in some tribes the avoidance between a man and his wife's mother lasts only until he has had a child by his wife; while in others, though avoidance continues longer, it gradually wears away with time as the man and woman advance in years, and in others, again, it is observed only between a man and his future mother-in-law, and comes to an end with his marriage. These customs suggest that in the minds of the people who practise them there is a close connexion between the avoidance of the wife's relations and the dread of an infertile marriage. The Indians of Yucatan, as we saw, believe that if a betrothed man were to meet his future mother-in-law or father-in-law, he would thereby lose the power of begetting children. Such a fear seems to be only an extension by false analogy of that belief in the disastrous consequences of illicit sexual relations which we dealt with in an earlier part of this chapter, and of which we shall have more to say presently. From thinking, rightly or wrongly, that sexual intercourse between certain persons is fraught with serious dangers, the savage jumped to the conclusion that social intercourse between them may be also perilous by virtue of a sort of physical infection acting through simple contact or even at a distance; or if, in many cases, he did not go so far as to suppose that for a man merely to see or touch his mother-in-law sufficed to blast the fertility of his wife's womb, yet he may have thought, with much better reason, that intimate social converse between him and her might easily lead to something worse, and that to guard against such a possibility it was best to raise a strong barrier of etiquette between them. It is not, of course, to be supposed that these rules of avoidance were the result of deliberate legislation; rather they were the spontaneous and gradual growth of feelings and thoughts of which the savages themselves perhaps had no clear consciousness. In what precedes I have merely attempted to sum up in language intelligible to civilized man the outcome of a long course of moral and social evolution.

These considerations perhaps obviate to some extent the only serious difficulty which lies in the way of the theory here advocated. If the custom of avoidance was adopted in order to guard against the danger of incest, how comes it that the custom is often observed towards persons of the same sex, for example, by a man towards his father-in-law as well as towards his mother-in-law? The difficulty is undoubtedly serious: the only way of meeting it that I can suggest is the one I have already indicated. We may suppose that the deeply rooted beliefs of the savage in the fatal effects of marriage between certain classes of persons, whether relations by blood or connexions by marriage, gradually spread in his mind so as to embrace the relations between men and men as well as between men and women; till he had worked himself into the conviction that to see or touch his father-in-law, for example, was nearly or quite as dangerous as to touch or have improper relations with his mother-in-law. It is no doubt easy for us to detect the flaw in this process of reasoning; but we should beware of casting stones at the illogical savage, for it is possible or even probable that many of our own cherished convictions are no better founded.

Viewed from this standpoint the customs of ceremonial avoidance among savages assume a serious aspect very different from the appearance of arbitrariness and absurdity which they are apt to present to the civilized observer who does not look below the surface of savage society. So far as these customs have helped, as they probably have done, to suppress the tendency to inbreeding, that is, to the marriage of near relations, we must conclude that their effect has been salutary, if, as many eminent biologists hold, long-continued inbreeding is injurious to the stock, whether animal or vegetable, by rendering it in the end infertile. However, men of science are as yet by no means agreed as to the results of consanguineous marriages, and a living authority on the subject has recently closed a review of the evidence as follows: "When we take into account such evidence as there is from animals and plants, and such studies as those of Huth, and the instances and counter-instances of communities with a high degree of consanguinity, we are led to the conclusion that the prejudices and laws of many peoples against the marriage of near kin rest on a basis not so much biological as social." Whatever may be the ultimate verdict of science on this disputed question, it will not affect the result of the present enquiry, which merely affirms the deep and far-reaching influence which in the long course of human history superstition has exercised on morality. Whether the influence has on the whole been for good or evil does not concern us. It suffices for our purpose to shew that superstition has been a crutch to morality, whether to support it in the fair way of virtue or to precipitate it into the miry pit of vice. To return to the point from which we wandered into this digression, we must leave in suspense the question whether the Australian savages were wise or foolish who forbade a man under pain of death to speak to his mother-in-law.

I will conclude this part of my subject with a few more instances of the extreme severity with which certain races have visited what they deemed improper connexions between the sexes.

Among the Indians who inhabited the coast of Brazil near Rio de Janeiro about the middle of the sixteenth century, a married woman who gave birth to an illegitimate child was either killed or abandoned to the caprice of the young men who could not afford to keep a wife. Her child was buried alive; for they said that were he to grow up he would only serve to perpetuate his mother's disgrace; he would not be allowed to go to war with the rest for fear of the misfortunes and disasters he might draw down upon them, and no one would eat any food, whether venison, fish, or what not, which the miserable outcast had touched. In Ruanda, a district of Central Africa, down to recent years any unmarried woman who was got with child used to be put to death with her baby, whether born or unborn. A spot at the mouth of the Akanyaru river was the place of execution, where the guilty women and their innocent offspring were hurled into the water. As usual, this Puritanical strictness of morality has been relaxed under European influence; illegitimate children are still killed, but their mothers escape with the fine of a cow. Among the Saxons down to the days of St. Boniface the adulteress or the maiden who had dishonoured her father's house was compelled to hang herself, was burned, and her paramour hung over the blazing pile; or she was scourged or cut to pieces with knives by all the women of the village till she was dead. Among the Slav peoples of the Balkan peninsula women convicted of immoral conduct used to be stoned to death. About the year 1770 a young betrothed couple were thus executed near Cattaro in Dalmatia, because the girl was found to be with child. The youth offered to marry her, and the priest begged that the sentence of death might be commuted to perpetual banishment; but the people declared that they would not have a bastard born among them; and the two fathers of the luckless couple threw the first stones at them. When Miss M. Edith Durham related this case to some Montenegrin peasantry, they all said that in the old days stoning was the proper punishment for unchaste women; the male paramours were shot by the relations of the girls whom they had seduced. When "that modern Messalina," Queen Draga of Servia, was murdered, a decent peasant woman remarked that "she ought to be under the cursed stone heap" . The country-folk of Montenegro, who heard the news of the murder from Miss Durham, "looked on it as a cleansing--a casting out of abominations--and genuinely believed that Europe would commend the deed, and that the removal of this sinful woman would bring prosperity to the land." Even down to the second half of the nineteenth century in cases of seduction among the Southern Slavs the people proposed to stone both the culprits to death. This happened, for example, in Herzegovina in the year 1859, when a young man named Milutin seduced or was seduced by three unmarried girls and got them all with child. The people sat in judgment upon the sinners, and, though an elder proposed to stone them all, the court passed a milder sentence. The young man was to marry one of the girls, to rear the infants of the other two as his legitimate children, and next time there was a fight with the Turks he was to prove his manhood by rushing unarmed upon the enemy and wresting their weapons from them, alive or dead. The sentence was fulfilled to the letter, though many years passed before the culprit could carry out the last part of it. However, his time came in 1875, when Herzegovina revolted against the Turks. Then Milutin ran unarmed upon a regiment of the enemy and found among the Turkish bayonets a hero's death. Even now the Old Catholics among the South Slavs believe that a village in which a seducer is not compelled to marry his victim will be punished with hail and excessive rain. For this article of faith, however, they are ridiculed by their enlightened Catholic neighbours, who hold the far more probable view that thunder and lightning are caused by the village priest to revenge himself for unreasonable delays in the payment of his salary. A heavy hail-storm has been known to prove almost fatal to the local incumbent, who was beaten within an inch of his life by his enraged parishioners.

It is difficult to believe that in these and similar cases the community would inflict such severe punishment for sexual offences if it did not believe that its own safety, and not merely the interest of a few individuals, was imperilled thereby.

If now we ask why illicit relations between the sexes should be supposed to disturb the balance of nature and particularly to blast the fruits of the earth, a partial answer may be conjecturally suggested. It is not enough to say that such relations are displeasing to the gods, who punish indiscriminately the whole community for the sins of a few. For we must always bear in mind that the gods are creations of man's fancy; he fashions them in human likeness, and endows them with tastes and opinions which are merely vast cloudy projections of his own. To affirm, therefore, that something is a sin because the gods will it so, is only to push the enquiry one stage farther back and to raise the further question, Why are the gods supposed to dislike and punish these particular acts? In the case with which we are here concerned, the reason why so many savage gods prohibit adultery, fornication, and incest under pain of their severe displeasure may perhaps be found in the analogy which many savage men trace between the reproduction of the human species and the reproduction of animals and plants. The analogy is not purely fanciful, on the contrary it is real and vital; but primitive peoples have given it a false extension in a vain attempt to apply it practically to increasing the food supply. They have imagined, in fact, that by performing or abstaining from certain sexual acts they thereby directly promoted the reproduction of animals and the multiplication of plants. All such acts and abstinences, it is obvious, are purely superstitious and wholly fail to effect the desired result. They are not religious but magical; that is, they compass their end, not by an appeal to the gods, but by manipulating natural forces in accordance with certain false ideas of physical causation. In the present case the principle on which savages seek to propagate animals and plants is that of magical sympathy or imitation: they fancy that they assist the reproductive process in nature by mimicking or performing it among themselves. Now in the evolution of society such efforts to control the course of nature directly by means of magical rites appear to have preceded the efforts to control it indirectly by appealing to the vanity and cupidity, the good-nature and pity of the gods; in short, magic seems to be older than religion. In most races, it is true, the epoch of unadulterated magic, of magic untinged by religion, belongs to such a remote past that its existence, like that of our ape-like ancestors, can be a matter of inference only; almost everywhere in history and the world we find magic and religion side by side, at one time allies, at another enemies, now playing into each other's hands, now cursing, objurgating, and vainly attempting to exterminate one another. On the whole the lower intelligences cling closely, though secretly, to magic, while the higher intelligences have discerned the vanity of its pretensions and turned to religion instead. The result has been that beliefs and rites which were purely magical in origin often contract in course of time a religious character; they are modified in accordance with the advance of thought, they are translated into terms of gods and spirits, whether good and beneficent, or evil and malignant. We may surmise, though we cannot prove, that a change of this sort has come over the minds of many races with regard to sexual morality. At some former time, perhaps, straining a real analogy too far, they believed that those relations of the human sexes which for any reason they regarded as right and natural had a tendency to promote sympathetically the propagation of animals and plants and thereby to ensure a supply of food for the community; while on the contrary they may have imagined that those relations of the human sexes which for any reason they deemed wrong and unnatural had a tendency to thwart and impede the propagation of animals and plants and thereby to diminish the common supply of food.

Such a belief, it is obvious, would furnish a sufficient motive for the strict prohibition of what were deemed improper relations between men and women; and it would explain the deep horror and detestation with which sexual irregularities are viewed by many, though certainly not by all, savage tribes. For if improper relations between the human sexes prevent animals and plants from multiplying, they strike a fatal blow at the existence of the tribe by cutting off its supply of food at the roots. No wonder, therefore, that wherever such superstitions have prevailed the whole community, believing its very existence to be put in jeopardy by sexual immorality, should turn savagely on the culprits, and beat, burn, drown or otherwise exterminate them in order to rid itself of so dangerous a pollution. And when with the advance of knowledge men began to perceive the mistake they had made in imagining that the commerce of the human sexes could affect the propagation of animals and plants, they would still through long habit be so inured to the idea of the wickedness of certain sexual relations that they could not dismiss it from their minds, even when they discerned the fallacious nature of the reasoning by which they had arrived at it. The old practice would therefore stand, though the old theory had fallen: the old rules of sexual morality would continue to be observed, but if they were to retain the respect of the community, it was necessary to place them on a new theoretical basis. That basis, in accordance with the general advance of thought, was supplied by religion. Sexual relations which had once been condemned as wrong and unnatural because they were supposed to thwart the natural multiplication of animals and plants and thereby to diminish the food supply, would now be condemned because it was imagined that they were displeasing to gods or spirits, those stalking-horses which savage man rigs out in the cast-off clothes of his still more savage ancestors. The moral practice would therefore remain the same, though its theoretical basis had been shifted from magic to religion. In this or some such way as this we may conjecture that the Karens, Dyaks, and other savages reached those curious conceptions of sexual immorality and its consequences which we have been considering. But from the nature of the case the development of moral theory which I have sketched is purely hypothetical and hardly admits of verification.

However, even if we assume for a moment that the savages in question reached their present view of sexual immorality in the way I have surmised, there still remains the question, How did they originally come to regard certain relations of the sexes as immoral? For clearly the notion that such immorality interferes with the course of nature must have been secondary and derivative: people must on independent grounds have concluded that certain relations between men and women were wrong and injurious before they extended the conclusion by false analogy to nature. The question brings us face to face with the deepest and darkest problem in the history of society, the problem of the origin of the laws which still regulate marriage and the relations of the sexes among civilized nations; for broadly speaking the fundamental laws which we recognize in these matters are recognized also by savages, with this difference, that among many savages the sexual prohibitions are far more numerous, the horror excited by breaches of them far deeper, and the punishment inflicted on the offenders far sterner than with us. The problem has often been attacked, but never solved. Perhaps it is destined, like so many riddles of that Sphinx which we call nature, to remain for ever insoluble. At all events this is not the place to broach so intricate and profound a discussion. I return to my immediate subject.

Similar views as to the disastrous effects of adultery on mother and child seem to be widespread among Bantu tribes. Thus among the Awemba of Northern Rhodesia, when both mother and child die in childbirth, great horror is expressed by all, who assert that the woman must assuredly have committed adultery with many men to suffer such a fate. They exhort her even with her last breath to name the adulterer; and whoever is mentioned by her is called the "murderer" and has afterwards to pay a heavy fine to the injured husband. Similarly if the child is born dead and the mother survives, the Awemba take it for granted that the woman has been unfaithful to her husband, and they ask her to name the murderer of her child, that is, the man whose guilty love has been the death of the babe. In like manner the Thonga, a Bantu tribe of South Africa, about Delagoa Bay, are of opinion that if a woman's travail pangs are unduly prolonged or she fails to bring her offspring to the birth, she must certainly have committed adultery, and they insist upon her making a clean breast as the only means of ensuring her delivery; should she suppress the name even of one of several lovers with whom she may have gone astray, the child cannot be born. So convinced are the women of the sufferings which adultery, if unacknowledged, entails on the guilty mother in childbed, that a woman who knows her child to be illegitimate will privately confess her sin to the midwife before she is actually brought to bed, in the hope thereby of alleviating and shortening her travail pangs. Further, the Thonga believe that adultery establishes a physical relationship of mutual sympathy between the adulterer and the injured husband such that the life of the one is in a manner bound up with the life of the other; indeed this relationship is thought to arise between any two men who have had sexual connexion with the same woman. As a native put it to a missionary, "They have met together in one life through the blood of that woman; they have drunk from the same pool." To express it otherwise, they have formed a blood covenant with each other through the woman as intermediary. "This establishes between them a most curious mutual dependence: should one of them be ill, the other must not visit him; the patient might die. If he runs a thorn into his foot, the other must not help him to extract it. It is taboo. The wound would not heal. If he dies, his rival must not assist at his mourning or he would die himself." Hence if a man has committed adultery, as sometimes happens, with one of his father's younger wives, and the father dies, his undutiful son may not take the part which would otherwise fall to him in the funeral rites; indeed should he attempt to attend the burial, his relations would drive him away in pity, lest by this mark of respect and perhaps of remorse he should forfeit his life. In like manner the Akikuyu of British East Africa believe that if a son has adulterous intercourse with one of his father's wives, the innocent father, not the guilty young scapegrace, contracts a dangerous pollution , the effect of which is to make him ill and emaciated or to break out into sores or boils, and even in all probability to die, if the danger is not averted by the timely intervention of a medicine-man. The Anyanja of British Central Africa believe that if a man commits adultery while his wife is with child, she will die; hence on the death of his wife the widower is often roundly accused of having killed her by his infidelity. Without going so far as this, the Masai of German East Africa hold that if a father were to touch his infant on the day after he had been guilty of adultery, the child would fall sick. According to the Akamba of British East Africa, if a woman after giving birth to a child is false to her husband before her first menstruation, the child will surely die. The Akamba are also of opinion that if a woman is guilty of incest with her brother she will be unable to bring to the birth the seed which she has conceived by him. In that case the man must purge his sin by bringing a big goat to the elders, and the woman is ceremonially smeared with the contents of the animal's stomach. Among the Washamba of German East Africa it happened that a married woman lost three children, one after the other, by death. A diviner being called in to ascertain the cause of this calamity, attributed it to incest of which she had been accidentally guilty with her father.

Again, it appears to be a common notion with savages that the infidelity of a wife prevents her husband from killing game, and even exposes him to imminent risk of being himself killed or wounded by wild beasts. This belief is entertained by the Wagogo and other peoples of East Africa, by the Moxos Indians of Bolivia, and by Aleutian hunters of sea-otters. In such cases any mishap that befalls the husband during the chase is set down by him to the score of his wife's misconduct at home; he returns in wrath and visits his ill-luck on the often innocent object of his suspicions even, it may be, to the shedding of her blood. While the Huichol Indians of Mexico are away seeking for a species of cactus which they regard as sacred, their women at home are bound to be strictly chaste; otherwise they believe that they would be visited with illness and would endanger the success of the men's expedition. An old writer on Madagascar tells us that though Malagasy women are voluptuous they will not allow themselves to be drawn into an intrigue while their husbands are absent at the wars, for they believe that infidelity at such a time would cause the absent spouse to be wounded or slain. The Baganda of Central Africa held similar views as to the fatal effect which a wife's adultery at home might have on her absent husband at the wars; they thought that the gods resented her misconduct and withdrew their favour and protection from her warrior spouse, thus punishing the innocent instead of the guilty. Indeed, it was believed that if a woman were even to touch a man's clothing while her husband was away with the army, it would bring misfortune on her husband's weapon, and might even cost him his life. The gods of the Baganda were most particular about women strictly observing the taboos during their husbands' absence and having nothing to do with other men all that time. On his return from the war a man tested his wife's fidelity by drinking water from a gourd which she handed to him before he entered his house. If she had been unfaithful to him during his absence, the water was supposed to make him ill; hence should it chance that he fell sick after drinking the draught, his wife was at once clapped into the stocks and tried for adultery; and if she confessed her guilt and named her paramour, the offender was heavily fined or even put to death. Similarly among the Bangala or the Boloki of the Upper Congo, "when men went to fight distant towns their wives were expected not to commit adultery with such men as were left in the town, or their husbands would receive spear wounds from the enemy. The sisters of the fighters would take every precaution to guard against the adultery of their brothers' wives while they were on the expedition." So among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, while the men were away at the wars, their wives "all slept in one house to keep watch over each other; for, if a woman were unfaithful to her husband while he was with a war-party, he would probably be killed." If only King David had held this belief he might have contented himself with a single instead of a double crime, and need not have sent his Machiavellian order to put the injured husband in the forefront of the battle.

The Zulus imagine that an unfaithful wife who touches her husband's furniture without first eating certain herbs causes him to be seized with a fit of coughing of which he soon dies. Moreover, among the Zulus "a man who has had criminal intercourse with a sick person's wife is prohibited from visiting the sick-chamber; and, if the sick person is a woman, any female who has committed adultery with her husband must not visit her. They say that, if these visits ever take place, the patient is immediately oppressed with a cold perspiration and dies. This prohibition was thought to find out the infidelities of the women and to make them fear discovery." For a similar reason, apparently, during the sickness of a Caffre chief his tribe was bound to observe strict continence under pain of death. The notion seems to have been that any act of incontinence would through some sort of magical sympathy prove fatal to the sick chief. The Ovakumbi, a tribe in the south of Angola, think that the carnal intercourse of young people under the age of puberty would cause the king to die within the year, if it were not severely punished. The punishment for such a treasonable offence used to be death. Similarly, in the kingdom of Congo, when the sacred pontiff, called the Chitom?, was going his rounds throughout the country, all his subjects had to live strictly chaste, and any person found guilty of incontinence at such times was put to death without mercy. They thought that universal chastity was essential to the preservation of the life of the pontiff, whom they revered as the head of their religion and their common father. Accordingly when he was abroad he took care to warn his faithful subjects by a public crier, that no man might plead ignorance as an excuse for a breach of the law.

These examples may suffice to shew that among many races sexual immorality, whether in the form of adultery, fornication, or incest, is believed of itself to entail, naturally and inevitably, without the intervention of society, most serious consequences not only on the culprits themselves, but also on the community, often indeed to menace the very existence of the whole people by destroying the food supply. I need hardly remind you that all these beliefs are entirely baseless; no such consequences flow from such acts; in short, the beliefs in question are a pure superstition. Yet we cannot doubt that wherever this superstition has existed it must have served as a powerful motive to deter men from adultery, fornication, and incest. If that is so, then I think I have proved my third proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for marriage, and has thereby contributed to the stricter observance of the rules of sexual morality both among the married and the unmarried.

I pass now to my fourth and last proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for human life and has thereby contributed to the security of its enjoyment.

The particular superstition which has had this salutary effect is the fear of ghosts, especially the ghosts of the murdered. The fear of ghosts is widespread, perhaps universal, among savages; it is hardly extinct among ourselves. If it were extinct, some learned societies might put up their shutters. Dead or alive, the fear of ghosts has certainly not been an unmixed blessing. Indeed it might with some show of reason be maintained that no belief has done so much to retard the economic and thereby the social progress of mankind as the belief in the immortality of the soul; for this belief has led race after race, generation after generation, to sacrifice the real wants of the living to the imaginary wants of the dead. The waste and destruction of life and property which this faith has entailed are enormous and incalculable. Without entering into details I will illustrate by a single example the disastrous economic, political, and moral consequences which flow from that systematic destruction of property which the fear of the dead has imposed on many races. Speaking of the Patagonians, the well-informed and intelligent traveller d'Orbigny observes: "They have no laws, no punishments inflicted on the guilty. Each lives as he pleases, and the greatest thief is the most highly esteemed, because he is the most dexterous. A motive which will always prevent them from abandoning the practice of theft, and at the same time will always present an obstacle to their ever forming fixed settlements, is the religious prejudice which, on the death of one of their number, obliges them to destroy his property. A Patagonian, who has amassed during the whole of his life an estate by thieving from the whites or exchanging the products of the chase with neighbouring tribes, has done nothing for his heirs; all his savings are destroyed with him, and his children are obliged to rebuild their fortunes afresh,--a custom which, I may observe in passing, is found also among the Tamanaques of the Orinoco, who ravage the field of the deceased and cut down the trees which he has planted; and among the Yuracares, who abandon and shut up the house of the dead, regarding it as a profanation to gather a single fruit from the trees of his field. It is easy to see that with such customs they can nourish no real ambition since their needs are limited to themselves; it is one of the causes of their natural indolence and is a motive which, so long as it exists, will always impede the progress of their civilization. Why should they trouble themselves about the future when they have nothing to hope from it? The present is all in all in their eyes, and their only interest is individual; the son will take no care of his father's herd, since it will never come into his possession; he busies himself only with his own affairs and soon turns his thoughts to looking after himself and getting a livelihood. This custom has certainly something to commend it from the moral point of view in so far as it destroys all the motives for that covetousness in heirs which is too often to be seen in our cities. The desire or the hope of a speedy death of their parents cannot exist, since the parents leave absolutely nothing to their children; but on the other hand, if the Patagonians had preserved hereditary properties, they would without doubt have been to-day in possession of numerous herds, and would necessarily have been more formidable to the whites, since their power in that case would have been more than doubled, whereas their present habits will infallibly leave them in a stationary state, from which nothing but a radical change will be able to deliver them." Thus poverty, indolence, improvidence, political weakness, and all the hardships of a nomadic life are the miserable inheritance which the fear of the dead entails on these wretched Indians. Heavy indeed is the toll which superstition exacts from all who pass within her gloomy portal.

But I am not here concerned with the disastrous and deplorable consequences, the unspeakable follies and crimes and miseries, which have flowed in practice from the theory of a future life. My business at present is with the more cheerful side of the subject, with the wholesome, though groundless, terror which ghosts, apparitions, and spectres strike into the breasts of hardened ruffians and desperadoes. So far as such persons reflect at all and regulate their passions by the dictates of prudence, it seems plain that a fear of ghostly retribution, of the angry spirit of their victim, must act as a salutary restraint on their disorderly impulses; it must reinforce the dread of purely secular punishment and furnish the choleric and malicious with a fresh motive for pausing before they imbrue their hands in blood. This is so obvious, and the fear of ghosts is so notorious, that both might perhaps be taken for granted, especially at this late hour of the evening. But for the sake of completeness I will mention a few illustrative facts, taking them almost at random from distant races in order to indicate the wide diffusion of this particular superstition. I shall try to shew that while all ghosts are feared, the ghosts of slain men are especially dreaded by their slayers.

The ancient Greeks believed that the soul of any man who had just been killed was angry with his slayer and troubled him; hence even an involuntary homicide had to depart from his country for a year until the wrath of the dead man had cooled down; nor might the slayer return until sacrifice had been offered and ceremonies of purification performed. If his victim chanced to be a foreigner, the homicide had to shun the country of the dead man as well as his own. The legend of the matricide Orestes, how he roamed from place to place pursued and maddened by the ghost of his murdered mother, reflects faithfully the ancient Greek conception of the fate which overtakes the murderer at the hands of the ghost.

But it is important to observe that not only does the hag-ridden homicide go in terror of his victim's ghost; he is himself an object of fear and aversion to the whole community on account of the angry and dangerous spirit which dogs his steps. It was probably more in self-defence than out of consideration for the manslayer that Attic law compelled him to quit the country. This comes out clearly from the provisions of the law. For in the first place, on going into banishment the homicide had to follow a prescribed road: obviously it would have been hazardous to let him stray about the country with a wrathful ghost at his heels. In the second place, if another charge was brought against a banished homicide, he was allowed to return to Attica to plead in his defence, but he might not set foot on land; he had to speak from a ship, and even the ship might not cast anchor or put out a gangway. The judges avoided all contact with the culprit, for they judged the case sitting or standing on the shore. Plainly the intention of this rule was literally to insulate the slayer, lest by touching Attic earth even indirectly through the anchor or the gangway he should blast it by a sort of electric shock, as we might say; though doubtless the Greeks would have said that the blight was wrought by contact with the ghost, by a sort of effluence of death. For the same reason if such a man, sailing the sea, happened to be wrecked on the coast of the country where his crime had been committed, he was allowed to camp on the shore till a ship came to take him off, but he was expected to keep his feet in sea-water all the time, evidently to neutralise the ghostly infection and prevent it from spreading to the soil. For the same reason, when the turbulent people of Cynaetha in Arcadia had perpetrated a peculiarly atrocious massacre and had sent envoys to Sparta, all the Arcadian states through which the envoys took their way ordered them out of the country; and after their departure the Mantineans purified themselves and their belongings by sacrificing victims and carrying them round the city and the whole of their land. So when the Athenians had heard of a massacre at Argos, they caused purificatory offerings to be carried round the public assembly.

No doubt the root of all such observances was a fear of the dangerous ghost which haunts the murderer and against which the whole community as well as the homicide himself must be on its guard. The Greek practice in these respects is clearly mirrored in the legend of Orestes; for it is said that the people of Troezen would not receive him in their houses until he had been purified of his guilt, that is, until he had been rid of his mother's ghost. The Akikuyu of British East Africa think that if a man who has killed another comes and sleeps at a village and eats with a family in their hut, the persons with whom he has eaten contract a dangerous pollution which might prove fatal to them were it not removed in time by a medicine-man. The very skin on which the homicide slept has absorbed the taint and might infect any one else who slept on it. So a medicine-man is sent for to purify the hut and its occupants. The Greek mode of purifying a homicide was to kill a sucking pig and wash the hands of the guilty man in its blood: until this ceremony had been performed the manslayer was not allowed to speak. Among the hill-tribes near Rajamahal in Bengal, if two men quarrel and blood be shed, the one who cut the other is fined a hog or a fowl, "the blood of which is sprinkled over the wounded person, to purify him, and to prevent his being possessed by a devil." In this case the blood-sprinkling is avowedly intended to prevent the man from being haunted by a spirit; only it is not the aggressor but his victim who is supposed to be in danger and therefore to stand in need of purification. We have seen that among these and other savage tribes pig's blood is sprinkled on persons and things as a mode of purifying them from the pollution of sexual crimes. Among the Cameroon negroes in West Africa accidental homicide can be expiated by the blood of an animal. The relations of the slayer and of the slain assemble. An animal is killed, and every person present is smeared with its blood on his face and breast. They think that the guilt of manslaughter is thus atoned for, and that no punishment will overtake the homicide. In Car Nicobar a man possessed by devils is cleansed of them by being rubbed all over with pig's blood and beaten with leaves. The devils are supposed to be thus swept off like flies from the man's body to the leaves, which are then folded up and tied tightly with a special kind of string. A professional exorciser administers the beating, and at every stroke with the leaves he falls down with his face on the floor and calls out in a squeaky voice, "Here is a devil." This ceremony is performed by night; and before daybreak all the packets of leaves containing the devils are thrown into the sea. The Greeks similarly used laurel leaves as well as pig's blood in purificatory ceremonies. In all such cases we may assume that the purification was originally conceived as physical rather than as moral, as a sort of detergent which washed, swept, or scraped the ghostly or demoniacal pollution from the person of the ghost-haunted or demon-possessed man. The motive for employing blood in these rites of cleansing is not clear. Perhaps the purgative virtue ascribed to it may have been based on the notion that the offended spirit accepts the blood as a substitute for the blood of the man or woman. However, it is doubtful whether this explanation could cover all the cases in which blood is sprinkled as a mode of purification. Certainly it is odd, as the sage Heraclitus long ago remarked, that blood-stains should be thought to be removed by blood-stains, as if a man who had been bespattered with mud should think to cleanse himself by bespattering himself with more mud. But the ways of man are wonderful and sometimes past finding out.

Among the Bantu tribes of Kavirondo, in British East Africa, when a man has killed an enemy in warfare he shaves his head on his return home, and his friends rub a medicine, which generally consists of cow's dung, over his body to prevent the spirit of the slain man from troubling him. Here cow's dung serves these negroes as a detergent of the ghost, just as pig's blood served the ancient Greeks. Among the Wawanga, about Mount Elgon in British East Africa, "a man returning from a raid, on which he has killed one of the enemy, may not enter his hut until he has taken cow-dung and rubbed it on the cheeks of the women and children of the village and purified himself by the sacrifice of a goat, a strip of skin from the forehead of which he wears round the right wrist during the four following nights." With the Ja-Luo of Kavirondo the custom is somewhat different. Three days after his return from the fight the warrior shaves his head. But before he may enter his village he has to hang a live fowl, head uppermost, round his neck; then the bird is decapitated and its head left hanging round his neck. Soon after his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order that his ghost may not haunt his slayer. In some of these cases the slayer shaves his head, precisely as the matricide Orestes is said to have shorn his hair when he came to his senses. From this Greek tradition we may infer with some probability that the hair of Greek homicides, like that of these African warriors, was regularly cropped as one way of ridding them of the ghostly infection. Among the Ba-Yaka, a Bantu people of the Congo Free State, "a man who has been killed in battle is supposed to send his soul to avenge his death on the person of the man who killed him; the latter, however, can escape the vengeance of the dead by wearing the red tail-feathers of the parrot in his hair, and painting his forehead red." Perhaps, as I have suggested elsewhere, this costume is intended to disguise the slayer from his victim's ghost. Among the Natchez Indians of North America young braves who had taken their first scalps were obliged to observe certain rules of abstinence for six months. They might not sleep with their wives nor eat flesh; their only food was fish and hasty-pudding. If they broke these rules they believed that the soul of the man they had killed would work their death by magic.

The Kai of German New Guinea stand in great fear of the ghosts of the men whom they have slain in war. On their way back from the field of battle or the scene of massacre they hurry in order to be safe at home or in the shelter of a friendly village before nightfall; for all night long the spirits of the dead are believed to dog the footsteps of their slayers, in the hope of coming up with them and recovering the lost portions of their souls which adhere with the clots of their blood to the spears and clubs that dealt them the death-blow. Only so can these poor restless ghosts find rest and peace. Hence the slayers are careful not to bring back the blood-stained weapons with them into the village; for that would be the first place where the ghosts would look for them. They hide them, therefore, in the forest at a safe distance from the village, where the ghosts can never find them; and when the spirits are weary of the fruitless search, they go away back to their dead bodies lying, it may be, among the blackened ruins of their desolated home. Then the victors come forth, and taking up the weapons from their hiding-places, wash them clean of blood and bring them back to the village. But "as more or less of the soul-stuff of their slain foes always sticks to the victors, none of their people may touch them after their return to the village. They are strictly shunned by their friends for several days. People go shyly out of their way. If any one in the village gets a pain in his stomach, it is assumed that he has sat down on the place of one of the warriors. If somebody complains of toothache, he must have eaten a fruit which had been touched by one of the combatants. All the leavings of the men's food must be most carefully put out of the way, lest a pig should get at them, for that would be the death of the animal. Therefore the remains of their meals are burnt or buried. The warriors themselves cannot suffer much from the soul-stuff of the foes, because they treat themselves with the disinfecting sap of a creeper. But even so they are not secure against all the dangers that threaten them from this quarter."

Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America a murderer whose life was spared by the kinsmen of his victim had to observe certain stringent rules for a period which varied from two to four years. He must walk barefoot, and he might eat no warm food, nor raise his voice, nor look around. He had to pull his robe around him and to keep it tied at the neck, even in warm weather; he might not let it hang loose or fly open. He might not move his hands about, but had to keep them close to his body. He might not comb his hair, nor might it be blown about by the wind. No one would eat with him, and only one of his kindred was allowed to remain with him in his tent. When the tribe went hunting, he was obliged to pitch his tent about a quarter of a mile from the rest of the people, "lest the ghost of his victim should raise a high wind which might cause damage." The reason here alleged for banishing the murderer from the camp of the hunters gives the clue to all the other restrictions laid on him: he was haunted by the ghost and therefore dangerous; hence people kept aloof from him, just as they are said to have done from the ghost-ridden Orestes.

While the spirit of a murdered man is thus feared by everybody, it is natural that it should be specially dreaded by those against whom for any reason he may be conceived to bear a grudge. For example, among the Yabim of German New Guinea, when the relations of a murdered man have accepted a bloodwit instead of avenging his death, they must allow the family of the victim to mark them with chalk on the brow. Were this not done, the ghost of their dead kinsman might come and trouble them for not doing their duty by him; he might drive away their pigs or loosen their teeth. The ghosts of murdered kinsfolk and neighbours are naturally more formidable than those of foreigners and strangers; for their wrath is hotter and they have more opportunities of wreaking their anger on the hard-hearted friends who either did them to death with their own hands or left their blood unavenged. Indeed some people only fear the wraiths of such persons, and regard with indifference all other ghosts, let them mow and gibber as much as they like. Thus among the Boloki of the Upper Congo "a homicide is not afraid of the spirit of the man he has killed when the slain man belongs to any of the neighbouring towns, as disembodied spirits travel in a very limited area only; but when he kills a man belonging to his own town he is filled with fear lest the spirit shall do him some harm. There are no special rites that he can observe to free himself from these fears, but he mourns for the slain man as though he were a member of his own family. He neglects his personal appearance, shaves his head, fasts for a certain period, and laments with much weeping." Again, a Kikuyu man does not incur ceremonial pollution by the slaughter of a man of another tribe, nor even of his own tribe, provided his victim belongs to another clan; but if the slain man is a member of the same clan as his slayer, the case is grave indeed. However, it is possible by means of a ceremony to bind over the ghost to keep the peace. For this purpose the murderer and the oldest surviving brother of his victim are seated facing each other on two trunks of banana trees; here they are solemnly fed by two elders with vegetable food of all kinds, which has been provided for the purpose by their mothers and sprinkled with the contents of the stomach of a sacrificed sheep. Next day the elders proceed to the sacred fig-tree , which plays a great part in the religious rites of the Akikuyu. There they sacrifice a pig and deposit some of the fat, the intestines, and the more important bones at the foot of the tree, while they themselves feast on the more palatable parts of the animal. They think that the ghost of the murdered man will visit the tree that very night in the outward shape of a wild cat and consume the meat, and that this offering will prevent him from returning to the village and troubling the inhabitants.

The Bare'e-speaking Toradjas of Central Celebes are greatly concerned about the souls of men who have been slain in battle. They appear to think that men who have been killed in war instead of dying by disease have not exhausted their vital energy and that therefore their departed spirits are more powerful than the common ruck of ghosts; and as on account of the unnatural manner of their death they cannot be admitted into the land of souls they continue to prowl about the earth, furious with the foes who have cut them off untimely in the prime of manhood, and demanding of their friends that they shall wage war on the enemy and send forth an expedition every year to kill some of them. If the survivors pay no heed to this demand of the bloodthirsty ghosts, they themselves are exposed to the vengeance of these angry spirits, who pay out their undutiful friends and relatives by visiting them with sickness and death. Hence with the Toradjas war is a sacred duty in which every member of the community is bound to bear a part; even women and children, who cannot wage real war, must wage mimic warfare at home by hacking with bamboo swords at an old skull of the enemy, while with their shrill voices they utter the war-whoop. Thus among these people, as among many more tribes of savages, a belief in the immortality of the soul has been one of the most fruitful causes of bloodshed by keeping up a perpetual state of war between neighbouring communities, who dare not make peace with each other for fear of mortally offending the spirits of the dead.

But, whether friends or foes, the ghosts of all who have died a violent death are in a sense a public danger; for their temper is naturally soured and they are apt to fall foul of the first person they meet without nicely discriminating between the innocent and the guilty. The Karens of Burma, for example, think that the spirits of all such persons go neither to the upper regions of bliss nor to the nether world of woe, but linger on earth and wander about invisible. They make men sick to death by stealing their souls. Accordingly these vampire-like beings are exceedingly dreaded by the people, who seek to appease their anger and repel their cruel assaults by propitiatory offerings and the most earnest prayers and supplications. They put red, yellow, and white rice in a basket and leave it in the forest, saying: "Ghosts of such as died by falling from a tree, ghosts of such as died of hunger or thirst, ghosts of such as died by the tiger's tooth or the serpent's fang, ghosts of the murdered dead, ghosts of such as died of small-pox or cholera, ghosts of dead lepers, O ill-treat us not, seize not upon our persons, do us no harm. O stay here in this wood. We will bring hither red rice, yellow rice, and white rice for your subsistence."

However, it is not always by fair words and propitiatory offerings that the community attempts to rid itself of these invisible but dangerous intruders. People sometimes resort to more forcible measures. "Once," says a traveller among the Indians of North America, "on approaching in the night a village of Ottawas, I found all the inhabitants in confusion: they were all busily engaged in raising noises of the loudest and most inharmonious kind. Upon inquiry, I found that a battle had been lately fought between the Ottawas and the Kickapoos, and that the object of all this noise was to prevent the ghosts of the departed combatants from entering the village." Again, after the North American Indians had burned and tortured a prisoner to death, they used to run through the village, beating the walls, the furniture, and the roofs of the huts with sticks and yelling at the pitch of their voices to drive away the angry ghost of the victim, lest he should seek to avenge the injuries done to his scorched and mutilated body. Similarly among the Papuans of Doreh in Dutch New Guinea, when a murder has been committed in the village, the inhabitants assemble for several evenings successively and shriek and shout to frighten away the ghost, in case he should attempt to come back. The Yabim, a tribe in German New Guinea, believe that "the dead can both help and harm, but the fear of their harmful influence is predominant. Especially the people are of opinion that the ghost of a slain man haunts his murderer and brings misfortune on him. Hence it is necessary to drive away the ghost with shrieks and the beating of drums. The model of a canoe laden with taro and tobacco is got ready to facilitate his departure." So when the Bukaua of German New Guinea have won a victory over their foes and have returned home, they kindle a fire in the middle of the village and hurl blazing brands in the direction of the battle-field, while at the same time they make an ear-splitting din, to keep at bay the angry spirits of the slain. When the cannibal Melanesians of the Bismarck Archipelago have eaten a human body, they shout, blow horns, shake spears, and beat the bushes for the purpose of driving away the ghost of the man or woman whose flesh has just furnished the banquet. The Fijians used to bury the sick and aged alive, and having done so they always made a great uproar with bamboos, shell-trumpets, and so forth in order to scare away the spirits of the buried people and prevent them from returning to their homes; and by way of removing any temptation to hover about their former abodes they dismantled the houses of the dead and hung them with everything that in their eyes seemed most repulsive. Among the Angoni, a Zulu tribe settled to the north of the Zambesi, warriors who have slain foes on an expedition smear their bodies and faces with ashes, and hang garments of their victims on their persons. This costume they wear for three days after their return, and rising at break of day they run through the village uttering frightful yells to banish the ghosts of the slain, which otherwise might bring sickness and misfortune on the people.

In Travancore the spirits of men who have died a violent death by drowning, hanging, or other means are supposed to become demons, wandering about to inflict injury in various ways upon mankind. Especially the ghosts of murderers who have been hanged are believed to haunt the place of execution and its neighbourhood. To prevent this it used to be customary to cut off the criminal's heels with a sword or to hamstring him as he was turned off. The intention of thus mutilating the body was no doubt to prevent the ghost from walking. How could he walk if he were hamstrung or had no heels? With precisely the same intention it has been customary with some peoples to maim in various ways the dead bodies not only of executed criminals but of other persons; for all ghosts are more or less dreaded. When any bad man died, the Esquimaux of Bering Strait used in the old days to cut the sinews of his arms and legs "in order to prevent the shade from returning to the body and causing it to walk at night as a ghoul." The Omaha Indians said that when a man was killed by lightning he should be buried face downwards, and that the soles of his feet should be slit; for if this were not done, his ghost would walk. The Herero of South Africa think that the ghosts of bad people appear and are just as mischievous as in life; for they rob, steal, and seduce women and girls, sometimes getting them with child. To prevent the dead from playing these pranks the Herero used to cut through the backbone of the corpse, tie it up in a bunch, and sew it into an ox-hide. A simple way of disabling a dangerous ghost is to dig up his body and decapitate it. This is done by West African negroes and also by the Armenians; to make assurance doubly sure the Armenians not only cut off the head but smash it or stick a needle into it or into the dead man's heart.

Among the Shans of Burma, when a woman dies with an unborn child, it is believed that her spirit turns into a malignant ghost, "who may return to haunt her husband's home and torment him, unless precautions are taken to keep her away. To begin with, her unborn child is removed by an operation; then mother and child are wrapped in separate mats and buried without coffins. If this be not done, the same misfortune may occur again to the woman, in her future life, and the widower will suffer from the attacks of the ghost. When the bodies are being removed from the house, part of the mat wall in the side of the house is taken down, and the dead woman and her baby are lowered to the ground through the aperture. The hole through which the bodies have passed is immediately filled with new mats, so that the ghost may not know how to return." The Kachins of Burma are so afraid of the ghosts of women dying in childbed that no sooner has such a death taken place than the husband, the children, and almost all the people in the house take to flight lest the ghost should bite them. They bandage the eyes of the dead woman with her own hair to prevent her from seeing anything; they wrap the corpse in a mat and carry it out of the house not by the ordinary door, but by an opening made for the purpose either in the wall or in the floor of the room where she breathed her last. Then they convey the body to a deep ravine where foot of man seldom penetrates, and there, having heaped her clothes, her jewellery, and all her belongings over her, they set fire to the pile and reduce the whole to ashes. "Thus they destroy all the property of the unfortunate woman in order that her soul may not think of coming to fetch it afterwards and to bite the people in the attempt." When this has been done, the officiating priest scatters some burnt grain of a climbing plant , inserts in the earth the pestle which the dead woman used to husk the rice, and winds up the exorcism by cursing and railing at her ghost, saying: "Wait to come back to us till this grain sprouts and this pestle blossoms, till the fern bears fruit, and the cocks lay eggs." The house in which the woman died is generally pulled down, and the timber may only be used as firewood or to build small hovels in the fields. Till a new house can be built for them, the widower and the orphans receive the hospitality of their nearest relatives, a father or a brother; their other friends would not dare to receive them from fear of the ghost. Occasionally the dead mother's jewels are spared from the fire and given away to some poor old crones, who do not trouble their heads about ghosts. If the medicine-man who attended the woman in life and officiated at the funeral is old, he may consent to accept the jewels as the fee for his services; but in that case no sooner has he got home than he puts the jewels in the henhouse. If the hens remain quiet, it is a good omen and he can keep the trinkets with an easy mind; but if the fowl flutter and cackle, it is a sign that the ghost is sticking to the jewels, and in a fright he restores them to the family. The old man or old woman into whose hands the trinkets of the dead woman thus sometimes fall cannot dispose of them to other members of the tribe; for nobody who knows where the things come from would be so rash as to buy them. However, they may find purchasers among the Shans or the Chinese, who do not fear Kachin ghosts.

The ghosts of women who die in childbed are much dreaded in the Indian Archipelago; it is supposed that they appear in the form of birds with long claws and are exceedingly dangerous to their husbands and also to pregnant women. A common way of guarding against them is to put an egg under each armpit of the corpse, to press the arms close against the body, and to stick needles in the palms of the hands. The people believe that the ghost of the dead woman will be unable to fly and attack people; for she will not spread out her arms for fear of letting the eggs fall, and she will not clutch anybody for fear of driving the needles deeper into her palms. Sometimes by way of additional precaution another egg is placed under her chin, thorns are thrust into the joints of her fingers and toes, her mouth is stopped with ashes, and her hands, feet, and hair are nailed to the coffin. Some Sea Dyaks of Borneo sow the ground near cemeteries with bits of sticks to imitate caltrops, in order that the feet of any ghosts who walk over them may be lamed. The Besisi of the Malay Peninsula bury their dead in the ground and let fall knives on the grave to prevent the ghost from getting up out of it. The Tunguses of Turukhansk on the contrary put their dead up in trees, and then lop off all the branches to prevent the ghost from scrambling down and giving them chase. The Herbert River natives in Queensland used to cut holes in the stomach, shoulders, and lungs of their dead and fill the holes with stones, in order that, weighed down with this ballast, the ghost might not stray far afield; to limit his range still further they commonly broke his legs. Other Australian blacks put hot coals in the ears of their departed brother; this keeps the ghost in the body for a time, and allows the relations to get a good start away from him. Also they bark the trees in a circle round the spot, so that when the ghost does get out and makes after them, he wanders round and round in a circle, always returning to the place from which he started. The ancient Hindoos put fetters on the feet of their dead that they might not return to the land of the living. The Tinneh Indians of Alaska grease the hands of a corpse, so that when his ghost grabs at people's souls to carry them off with him they slip through his greasy fingers and escape.

Some peoples bar the road from the grave to prevent the ghost from following them. The Tunguses make the barrier of snow or trees. Amongst the Mangars, one of the fighting tribes of Nepal, "when the mourners return home, one of their party goes ahead and makes a barricade of thorn bushes across the road midway between the grave and the house of the deceased. On the top of the thorns he puts a big stone on which he takes his stand, holding a pot of burning incense in his left hand and some woollen thread in his right. One by one the mourners step on the stone and pass through the smoke of the incense to the other side of the thorny barrier. As they pass, each takes a piece of thread from the man who holds the incense and ties it round his neck. The object of this curious ceremony is to prevent the spirit of the dead man from coming home with the mourners and establishing itself in its old haunts. Conceived of as a miniature man, it is believed to be unable to make its way on foot through the thorns, while the smell of the incense, to which all spirits are highly sensitive, prevents it from surmounting this obstacle on the shoulders of one of the mourners." The Chins of Burma burn their dead and collect the bones in an earthen pot. Afterwards, at a convenient season, the pot containing the bones is carried away to the ancestral burial-place, which is generally situated in the depth of the jungle. "When the people convey the pot of bones to the cemetery, they take with them some cotton-yarn, and whenever they come to any stream or other water, they stretch a thread across, whereby the spirit of the deceased, who accompanies them, may get across it too. When they have duly deposited the bones and food for the spirit in the cemetery they return home, after bidding the spirit to remain there, and not to follow them back to the village. At the same time they block the way by which they return by putting a bamboo across the path." Thus the mourners make the way to the grave as easy as possible for the ghost, but obstruct the way by which he might return from it.

The Algonquin Indians, not content with beating the walls of their huts to drive away the ghost, stretched nets round them in order to catch the spirit in the meshes, if he attempted to enter the house. Others made stinks to keep him off. The Ojebways also resorted to a number of devices for warding off the spirits of the dead. These have been described as follows by a writer who was himself an Ojebway: "If the deceased was a husband, it is often the custom for the widow, after the burial is over, to spring or leap over the grave, and then run zigzag behind the trees, as if she were fleeing from some one. This is called running away from the spirit of her husband, that it may not haunt her. In the evening of the day on which the burial has taken place, when it begins to grow dark, the men fire off their guns through the hole left at the top of the wigwam. As soon as this firing ceases, the old women commence knocking and making such a rattling at the door as would frighten away any spirit that would dare to hover near. The next ceremony is, to cut into narrow strips, like ribbon, thin birch bark. These they fold into shapes, and hang round inside the wigwam, so that the least puff of wind will move them. With such scarecrows as these, what spirit would venture to disturb their slumbers? Lest this should not prove effectual, they will also frequently take a deer's tail, and after burning or singeing off all the hair, will rub the necks or faces of the children before they lie down to sleep, thinking that the offensive smell will be another preventive to the spirit's entrance. I well remember when I used to be daubed over with this disagreeable fumigation, and had great faith in it all. Thinking that the soul lingers about the body a long time before it takes its final departure, they use these means to hasten it away."

The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco in South America live in great fear of the spirits of their dead. They imagine that any one of these disembodied spirits can become incarnate again and take a new lease of life on earth, if only it can contrive to get possession of a living man's body during the temporary absence of his soul. For like many other savages they imagine that the soul absents itself from the body during sleep to wander far away in the land of dreams. So when night falls, the ghosts of the dead come crowding to the villages and lurk about, hoping to find vacant bodies into which they can enter. Such are to the thinking of the Lengua Indian the perils and dangers of the night. When he awakes in the morning from a dream in which he seemed to be hunting or fishing far away, he concludes that his soul cannot yet have returned from such a far journey, and that the spirit within him must therefore be some ghost or demon, who has taken possession of his corporeal tenement in the absence of its proper owner. And if these Indians dread the spirits of the departed at all times, they dread them doubly at the moment when they have just shuffled off the mortal coil. No sooner has a person died than the whole village is deserted. Even if the death takes place shortly before sunset the place must at all costs be immediately abandoned, lest with the shades of night the ghost should return and do a mischief to the villagers. Not only is the village deserted, but every hut is burned down and the property of the dead man destroyed. For these Indians believe that, however good and kind a man may have been in his lifetime, his ghost is always a source of danger to the peace and prosperity of the living. The night after his death his disembodied spirit comes back to the village, and chilled by the cool night air looks about for a fire at which to warm himself. He rakes in the ashes to find at least a hot coal which he may blow up into a flame. But if they are all cold and dead, he flings a handful of them in the air and departs in dudgeon. Any Indian who treads on such ashes will have ill-luck, if not death, following at his heels. To prevent such mishaps the villagers take the greatest pains to collect and bury all the ash-heaps before they abandon the village. What the fate of a hamlet would be in which the returning ghost found the inhabitants still among their houses, no Indian dares to imagine. Hence it happens that many a village which was full of life at noon is a smoking desert at sunset. And as the Lenguas ascribe all sickness to the machinations of evil spirits and sorcerers, they mutilate the persons of their dying or dead in order to counteract and punish the authors of the disease. For this purpose they cut off the portion of the body in which the evil spirit is supposed to have ensconced himself. A common operation performed on the dying or dead man is this. A gash is made with a knife in his side, the edges of the wound are drawn apart with the fingers, and in the wound are deposited a dog's bone, a stone, and the claw of an armadillo. It is believed that at the departure of the soul from the body the stone will rise up to the Milky Way and will stay there till the author of the death has been discovered. Then the stone will come shooting down in the shape of a meteor and kill, or at least stun, the guilty party. That is why these Indians stand in terror of falling stars. The claw of the armadillo serves to grub up the earth and, in conjunction with the meteor, to ensure the destruction of the evil spirit or the sorcerer. What the virtue of the dog's bone is supposed to be has not yet been ascertained by the missionaries.

The Bhotias, who inhabit the Himalayan district of British India, perform an elaborate ceremony for transferring the spirit of a deceased person to an animal, which is finally beaten by all the villagers and driven away, that it may not come back. Having thus expelled the ghost the people return joyfully to the village with songs and dances. In some places the animal which thus serves as a scapegoat is a yak, the forehead, back, and tail of which must be white. But elsewhere, under the influence of Hindooism, sheep and goats have been substituted for yaks.

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