Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/120

 I02 Correspondence.

totem groups chose unto themselves new totems, new gods, new souls, new blood, thus accomplishing what Dr. Durkheim (vol. v., pp. no, in) declares to be impossible. And impossible it was if Dr. Durkheim's tlieory of what a totem then was, be his theory still. The change was possible, however, if the animal names of groups were, as yet, no more than mere names.

A. Lang.

The Corp Creagh.

(Vol. xiv., p. 373.)

The following instances of belief in the Corp Creagh were nar- rated by the Rev. Stopford Brooke in a lecture at which I was present at the end of 190 1. I wrote to him immediately after- wards asking for particulars, and received the kind reply sub- joined : —

" Dear Madam,

" I have little more to communicate than I said in the lecture.

" I. When I was a curate in Kensington in 1861 or 1862, I used to visit a girl in consumption who lived in one of the mews. She was a Devon girl, and had come to London on a visit or to service. She was convinced that another girl in Devonshire, who had taken her lover from her as she thought, hated her because he had loved her first, and had made a waxen image of her, into which, and especially into her breast, the girl drove pins every night ; ' and these,' she said, ' are killing me. She is a witch ; will you send down and have her punished and forbidden ? I shall then get well.' And this she talked of with full conviction every time I saw her. I did not worry the dying girl with contra- diction.

"2. A lady told me that, dining with a friend of hers in London (the story was told me about twenty years ago), her friend, after dinner, went to a cupboard in the room, out of which she brought a figure moulded in wax into the likeness of the woman who had seduced her husband from her. And she placed the figure inside