Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/168

154 likely to win. Remembering the sorcerer's tip, I replied "Awang Ranggong," though I did not know one bull from the other, and in the result "Awang Ranggong" certainly won hands down, breaking his opponent's horn in a few rounds and driving him off the field in most ignominious fashion. The sorcerer's reputation as a good "judge of cattle" naturally went up, though I must confess that it would take a great deal more proof than was actually forthcoming to make me believe that there could have been anything supernormal about the sorcerer's tip. The sorcerer appeared to remember what he had said when we talked with him afterwards, and I am inclined to look upon the performance as a very clever piece of acting, the voluntary or "conscious" element being often probably far greater than is imagined.

In this connection, I see that in the papers of March 18th a case was reported of a man who had the power of increasing the pulsations of his heart to 105 per minute, and of throwing himself into apparent convulsions as a means of extracting money from soft-hearted people.

We may here leave our facts and come to the question of their interpretation. And here, as I have already said, it is the ceremonial import of the first class of ceremonies in which I am personally most deeply interested. This is a problem which cannot be answered or settled off-hand, and I propose to leave this class to be dealt with last, as I can at present only vaguely indicate what I venture to think is a possible solution. The inductive method is our only guide through the gloom, and I will therefore commence by examining the three classes of ceremonies whose import we know.

First among these come objects admittedly used for divination, and I will commence with the Divining Lemon as the most instructive ceremony of this kind. In this case we have a tree whose spirit is the object, so to speak, of a special cult; the spirit of the lemon, equally with the lemon-tree,