Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/218

Rh 200 MAGIC Taken together, such a repertory of the demonolo^y and witchcraft of a special group of savage tribes shows remarkable correspondence in principle with the magic which once flourished in the civilized world, and which still lingers in peasant folklore. The very details often agree so much as to raise the question whether the magic of savages may sometimes have been borrowed from the lower class of colonists. The superstitions of the peasant are in fact what the savage would readily assimilate, as belonging to a state of mind like his own, and there is even evidence of European charms and omens having been sometimes borrowed by native tribes of Australia or America. It was necessary to mention this, if merely to point out that such borrowing has been only slight and superficial. It in no way upsets the general principle that the magic of the lower races was developed among them, fitting as it does with their low level of knowledge. Every book of travels in savage and barbaric countries shows the influence of the native magician, who, often at once sorcerer and established priest, and sometimes even chief of his tribe, by the aid of spirits and other supernatural means interferes in every act of life. Thus in the Pacific islands the Europeans found a whole class of sorcerers living by making diseases, their method being the familiar one of burning or otherwise practising on some morsel of hair or remnant of food, so as to send disease into its owner, by a malignant spirit tying knots in his inside till he writhed with agony. Every sick man was a source of profit to the sorcerer who was believed to have brought on the disease by burning his rubbish, and of course had to be bought off by liberal presents. In these Pacific islands a fact most important in the theory of magic everywhere comes into view with particular distinctness that such magical arts prove effective through the patient s own imagination ; when he knows or fancies that he has been bewitched he will fall ill, and he will actually die unless he can be persuaded that he has been cured. Thus, wherever sorcery is practised with the belief of its victims, some system of exorcism or some protective magical art becomes, not only necessary, but actually effective, a mental disease .being met by a mental remedy to match it. 1 At the discovery of America, the Spaniards found the native sorcerers throwing themselves into delirious ecstasy by snuffing a narcotic powder, their ravings in this state being held to be conversation with departed souls, through whose help they were able to cure the sick by expelling the disease. The class to which these sorcerers belong extends over South America, and is generally known under the name of paye (or allied terms). The sorcerer is described as being initiated by living in some wild spot till by fast ing and self-torture he attains his supernatural craft, becoming able to see spirits, to consecrate bits of bone or stone into powerful amulets, to .make good or bad weather, to gain mystic powers over familiar birds and beasts, to take omens from their cries or from the itching of his own skin, which latter symptom an Abipone diviner declared to portend an attack from a tribe of enemies, in spite of the missionary, who irreverently set it down to fleas. The old arts of the pay^s, their malicious witchcraft with herbs and hair, the use of narcotics to produce ecstasy, and their mental excitement by drumming, rattling, and dancing are still to be met with in the wild districts of Guiana and Brazil. In North America practitioners of the same kind are generally known as &quot; medicine-men,&quot; from the French colonists calling them medecins, as being the native doctors ; the term is really appropriate to barbaric magicians in all parts of the world, whose 1 See Ellis, Polynesian Researches ; Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia ; Polack, Manners and Customs of New Zealanders ; Waitz, vols. v., vi. arts of causing and curing disease generally include con siderable knowledge of herbs powerful as poisons and remedies, of simple stopping of wounds and bandaging hurt limbs, in fact of medicine in its elementary state, as- yet not separated from the magic with which it was at first inextricably mixed up. The medicine-man s apparatus includes the sorcerer s usual music, the rattle and the. drum, simple and primitive instruments whose constant association with the lower magic bears witness to the beginnings of music and magic having been associated together when civilization was yet in its low stages of develapment. The American sorcerer carries a &quot; medicine- bag &quot; made with the skin of his guardian animal, which protects him in fight, cures the bites of serpents, and strikes at a distance as a spiritual weapon. He knows, magic chants of power over the elements ; he can by sucking and blowing extract disease-animals from the sick ; he can make pictures and images and pierce them with thorns so as to kill the men or animals they represent ; and he can compel love by practising on the heart of the picture of the beloved one. 2 In Africa the native sorcerer bears the name of mganga among the west and central negro tribes, nyanya among the Zulus of the south. He is the rain-maker, an office of the utmost importance among tribes who may perish of famine and disease after a long: drought. In his craft a principal part is played by what the English in Africa (using the Portuguese word feiti^o, charm or amulet) call &quot; fetiches,&quot; which are claws, fangs, roots, stones, and any other odds and ends fancied to be inhabited by spirits or invested with superhuman power. These fetiches the negroes trust in for good and against evil fortune, with a confidence which no failure can shake further than to cause the unlucky bearer to discard a par ticular fetich which has failed, and to replace it by a more successful one. The African mganga has intercourse with demons ; and, being called on every day to predict the fortune of a fight or a bargain, or to discover lost or stolen cattle, he professes to gain information from the spirits, or uses his various modes of divination, such as taking omens from the cries of the eagle or the owl, the swimming: of berries, or the moving of sticks in his own hands as they twitch spasmodically in nervous excitement. As with magicians everywhere, his trade is profitable but dangerous, for if his arts of killing have been successful beyond bearing, or still worse if public opinion decides that he has wilfully withheld the rain, he may be drowned or burned as miser ably as one of the many victims he has done to death. 3 These instances are selected to give an idea of the sorcerers of the lower races and their modes of working, which are remarkable for their uniformity in the most distant regions, among tribes who can have had no communication or con nexion since remote ages. Where, however, such races as the African negroes come in contact with such foreigners as the Arabs, who though more civilized than themselves have not outgrown the magical stage, they borrow their more cultured magical arts, such as divination by lots. In this way the natives of Madagascar appear to have borrowed from the Arabs a system of lucky and unlucky days of birth, which, carried out with stupid ferocity, has cost the lives of thousands of children, born truly in an evil hour, for when the magician declares their birth ill-omened their fate is settled at once by putting them to death.* Turning now to the cultured nations of antiquity, among 2 See Waitz, vol. iii. ; Martins, fithnograpltie Amerikas ; Litters of Columbus ; Dobrizhoffer, Abipones ; Sehoolcraft, Indian Tribes of North America. 3 See Burton, Lake Regions of Central Africa ; Wood, Natural History of Man, vol. i. ; Callaway, Religious System of Amazulu, &c. 4 See Ellis, Madagascar vol. ii. chaps, vi., xv.; Dahle in Antanana rivo 4nnual, 1876.