Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/190

 i8o Pre-aniinistic Religion.

an invocation to the crab-fetish) ^ in his path. To remedy such supposed evils the native doctor betakes himself to the sucking cure and the like, whilst he meets spirits w^ith a more or less distinct set of contrivances, for instance the drum or rattle to frighten them, and the hollow bone to imprison them. Meanwhile Animism undoubtedly tends to provide a general explanation for all disease, since disease to the savage mind especially connotes what may be de- scribed as " infection " in the widest sense, and infection is eminently suggestive of the workings of a mobile aggressive agency such as spirit appears intrinsically to be. Let me briefly refer, however, to one form of malady which all the world over excites the liveliest religious Awe, and is yet, so far as I know, but rarely and loosely connected with Ani- mism by savage theorists. The horror of blood I take to be strictly parallel to the horror of a corpse already alluded to ; and I believe that in what Westermarck has termed the " mystic detestation " of woman, or in the unreasoning dread which causes a North American brave with a running sore to be banned from the camp,- we have a crucial case of a pure and virtually uncoloured religious feeling. The issue of blood "pertains to Wakanda," as the Omahas said.^ That is the primary vague utterance of Supernaturalism ; and strictly secondary, I conceive, and by way of ex post facto justification, is the belief in the magical properties of the blood, the theory that the blood is the life, or the Maori notion that it is full of germs ready to turn into malicious spirits.^

At this point my list of illustrations must come to a close ; and it therefore only remains for me to utter a last word in my own defence for having called attention to a subject that many will be ready to pronounce both trite, and at the same time incapable of exact or final treatment.

' Conolly,y. A. I., xxvi., 151. ^ Adair, Hist, of Am. Ind., 124. ^ Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, 267.
 * Cf. Tregear,/. A. I., xix., 101.