Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/433

 THE PRINCIPLES OF FASTING.

BY EDWARD WESTERMARCK, PH.D.

fasting is understood abstinence from all food and drink, or at least—in a looser sense of the word—from certain kinds of food, for a determined period. The custom of fasting is wide-spread among peoples at very different stages of civilisation, and is practised for a variety of purposes. In the present article I shall attempt to set forth the chief principles to which it may be traced.

A frequent and well-known object of fasting is to serve as a means of having supernatural converse, or acquiring supernatural powers. The savage, as Professor Tylor remarks, has many a time, for days and weeks together, to try involuntarily the effects of fasting, accompanied with other privations and with prolonged solitary contemplation in the desert or the forest. Under these circumstances he soon comes to see and talk with phantoms, which are to him visible personal spirits, and, having thus learnt the secret of spiritual intercourse, he thenceforth reproduces the cause in order to renew the effects. The Hindus believe that a fasting person will ascend to the heaven of that god in whose name he