Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/414

 3 88 Reviews.

Lycurgean Hogging of the boys at Sparta, and may have thought that the ancient Peloponnese was a political whole.

But the main object of the present notice is to estimate the value of the facts that Dr. Frazer has here set forth for general anthropology, and for the purposes of comparative religion. Much of his collection of data possesses undoubtedly a great intrinsic interest, whatever light it may throw on the development of some of the higher forms of faith and ritual. We are enabled to realise, for instance, how widespread is the fallacy that all sickness and death is an unnatural and abnormal event, due to the witchcraft of the enemy or the malevolence of the ghost. We may take such a belief as marking a line of cleavage between a civilised and an uncivilised people ; yet it does not immediately vanish with the spread of civilisation \ the Greek world had practically escaped from it by the dawn of the historical period, but the Babylonian remained susceptible to particular forms of the illusion. Its deadly social effects will be appreciated by Dr. Frazer's readers. Accord- ing to the logic of the belief, every death, however timely and natural, involves the retributive murder of someone else ; and the superstition is a force that tends to race-suicide. Fortunately some savage tribes show a progressive spirit even in such a hope- less situation as this : they find a way to avenge the vindictive ghost without kindling a tribal vendetta. Dr. Frazer's account on pp. 280-282 of the methods whereby the Kai tribe in German New Guinea combine murder with bogus-tricks to deceive the ghost is one of the most humorous passages in anthropological literature. He also discovers the same motive, the desire to deceive the ghost, in that interesting custom of arranging a sham fight, in which blood is sometimes shed, but not dangerously, between two parties of the same tribe or of adjacent tribes, on the occasion of the death of an important personage. He quotes three examples from Australia, German New Guinea, and Southern Melanesia. He probably has noted and will quote in another volume an example of the same rite among the Bangala people of the Upper Congo.i He suggests that this ritual, which is certainly not dramatic or commemorative of any story about the dead man, is a humane legal iiction, whereby the ghost is deluded into believing that his


 * The Journal of the Koyal Anthropological Institii/e, vol. xl. (1910), p. 378.