Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/68

54 robbery, and immorality abound. It would be difficult to find a person, man or woman, who has not been guilty of all three. On the other hand, there are fetishes to preserve the thief and liar from detection, and fetishes to keep the doer of every kind of evil from exposure and its consequences. If a man thieves and is not found out, well, his fetish is powerful and helped him; if he is caught, well, the other man had the stronger fetish. Thus a man must believe in witches, witchcraft, and the ordeal, but he is not bound to believe in every kind of fetish and charm, though he generally pins his faith to a few; neither is he forced to receive all ngangas at their own valuation, but he believes one here and there has the power to which he lays claim.

The native is therefore influenced by belief in the following various powers, arranged in the order of their importance:—1. Witches and witchcraft, and all kinds of evil spirits. 2. Ordeal-taking to discover the witch, or to disprove a serious charge of any kind. 3. Taboo. 4. Divination by various methods, as will be shown later. 5. Omens, good and bad. 6. "Medicine men" or wizards, i.e. nganga. 7. Fetishes and charms. About these seven things there are definite and almost fixed ideas generally accepted by the people, but when you come to other matters you find a veritable "olla-podrida" of ideas, chaotic in the extreme and impossible to reduce to any systematic order. The same person will tell you at different times that the departed spirit goes to the nether regions, or to a dark forest, or to the moon, or to the sun. There is no coherence in their beliefs, and their ideas about cosmogony and the future are very nebulous. Although they believe in punishment after death their faith is so hazy that it has lost all its deterrent force. If in the following pages a lack of logical unity is observed, it must be put to the debit of the native mind, as that lack of