Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/336

 the holding up the hand to invoke the personal divine shy, the successor of this primitive gesture remains to this day among the chief acts in the solemn oaths of European nations.

It could scarcely be shown more clearly with what childlike imagination the savage conceives that a symbolic action, such as touching his head or his spear, will somehow pass into reality. In connection with this group of oaths, we can carry yet a step further the illustration of the way men's minds work in this primitive stage of association of ideas. One of the accounts from New Guinea is that the swearer, holding up an arrow, calls on Heaven to punish him if he lies; but by turning the arrow the other way the oath can be neutralized. This is magic all over. What one symbol can do, the reverse symbol can undo. True to the laws of primitive magical reasoning, uncultured men elsewhere still carry on the symbolic reversal of their oaths. An Abyssinian chief, who had sworn an oath he disliked, has been seen to scrape it off his tongue and spit it out. There are still places in Germany where the false witness reckons to escape the spiritual consequences of perjury by crooking one finger, to make it, I suppose, not a straight but a crooked oath, or he puts his left hand to his side to neutralize what the right hand is doing. Here is the idea of our "over the left;" but so far as I know this has come down with us to mere schoolboy's shuffling.

It has just been noticed that the arsenal of deadly weapons by which the natives of Aracan swear, includes a tiger's tusk and a crocodile's tooth. This leads us to a group of instructive rites belonging to Central and North Asia. Probably to this day there may be seen in Russian law-courts in Siberia the oath on the bear's head. When an Ostiak is to be sworn a bear's head is brought into court, and the man makes believe to bite at it, calling on the bear to devour him in like manner if he does not tell the truth. Now, the meaning of this act goes beyond magic and into religion, for we are here in the region of bear-worship, among people who believe that this wise and divine beast knows what goes on, and will come and punish them. Nor need one wonder at this, for the idea that the bear will hear and come if called on is familiar to German mythology. I was interested to find it still in survival in Switzerland a few years ago, when a peasant-woman, whom a mischievous little English boy had irritated beyond endurance, pronounced the ancient awful imprecation on him, "The bear take thee!" (der Bär nimm dich!) Among the hill-tribes of India a tiger's skin is sworn on in the same sense as the bear's head among the Ostiaks. Rivers, again, which to the savage and barbarian are intelligent and personal divinities, are sworn by in strong belief that their waters will punish him who takes their name in vain. We can understand why Homeric heroes swore by the rivers, when we hear still among Hindoos how the sacred Ganges will take vengeance sure and terrible on the children