Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/202

194 all I can do is to condense from a much fuller account by this eminent scholar, and to give the most interesting facts and results he has obtained in a briefer form and for a wider circle of readers; and I shall not hesitate to quote very freely from Mr. Dahle's articles.

One word more of introduction. The ancient religious system, or rather the religious beliefs and practices, of the Malagasy, had little to do with what we commonly understand by "idolatry". There was, primarily, a somewhat pure and lofty theism; then a development of ancestor-worship, especially of the ancestors of the chiefs; later on, a fetishism, or trust in charms—personal, family, and tribal, becoming in very recent times a kind of national idolatry, but without anything like temple or priestly caste, only the priesthood of the father, the chief, and then the sovereign; and there was also a firm trust in various ordeals for the detection of concealed crimes. But along with all of these, and in many respects much more widely spread and more influential than any of them, was the belief of the Malagasy in Vintana, fate or destiny, and in the sikìdy, or practice of divination. The sikìdy was, as Mr. Dahle's chief Malagasy informant—"professor extraordinarius", he calls him—said, "the Bible of our ancestors", and was regarded as a divinely-given means of obtaining help and guidance in all the events and circumstances of everyday life.

Mr. Dahle, in his introductory paragraph to the first paper, thus humorously describes the native beliefs in the efficacy of divination: "If you want to look into the future, to detect secret enemies or dangers, to find out what is to be your lot of good or evil, the sikìdy is the means of doing it. And the best of it is, that it does not, like the Fates or Parces of old, mercilessly leave you to your destiny, but kindly undertakes to avert the dreaded evils. If you are sick, the mpisikìdy or diviner does not at all—like many of our modern doctors—treat you 'tentatively', which really means leaving you and nature to