Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/31

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Need I go further than this, with Mr. Frazer's book quite fresh in our minds? At least, I will mention the nearest parallel to this custom from another famous book. Professor Robertson Smith thus quotes from an early book on Arab custom {Religion of Semites, p. 320):—

"A camel is chosen as the victim, and is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together. When the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession, accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound while the last words of the hymn are still upon the lips of the congregation, and, in all haste, drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste that, in the short interval between the rise of the day star, which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood, and entrails, is wholly devoured."

Now, what would an analysis of this give us? Just those points which have been produced from two Devonshire customs, and which help, therefore, to stamp the latter as survivals from savagery which, if borrowed, must have been borrowed in savage times by savage people.

Witchcraft in killing an enemy by causing his image to be made, and inflicting injury upon the image, which injury will be transferred to the individual represented, is well known. But it is not so well known that in Scotland the method of thus producing vicarious injury upon an enemy takes us back to the stone age. On July 22, 1590,