Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/814

 Pascagoula, I am unable to say; but if Darwin's views are correct, and I have no doubt that they are, then we have a very probable explanation of the mysterious music; if not, then we are as much in the dark as ever.



N the spring of 1889 an officer of the United States Army, who was visiting Nassau, N. P., for the benefit of his health, lent me a pamphlet, a reprint of Dr. Washington Matthews's "The Prayer of a Navajo Shaman," which had originally been published in the "American Anthropologist" for April, 1888, and at page 19 of that pamphlet I read as follows:

"The suppliant is supposed, through the influence of witch-craft, exercised either in this world, or in the lower world when in spirit he was traveling there, to have lost his body, or parts thereof—not his visible body, nor yet his soul, his breath of life—for both of these he knows himself to be still in possession of, but a sort of spiritual body which he thinks constitutes a part of him—the astral body, perhaps, of our theosophic friends. This third element of man belongs not only to his living person, but to things which pertain to it, such as his ejected saliva, his fallen hair, the dust of his feet, etc."

What struck me in this passage was the curious analogy between the belief thus stated to be held by the Navajos and one which, in the course of my investigation of the religious systems of the negroes of West Africa, I had discovered to be held by the various tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts; and it is with the object of calling the attention of American anthropologists to this third element in man that I venture to put forward this paper.

The Navajo believes that there are three entities in man: (1) The 