Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/160

146 thought due to a whole personal spirit embodied in or attached to it, or to some less definable influence exerted through it. In some cases this point is made clear, but in many it remains doubtful.

It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a fetish, to glance at a curious group of nations which connect a disease at once with spiritual influence, and with the presence of some material object. They are a set of illustrations of the savage principle, that a disease or an actual disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or such-like material object. Among the natives of Australia, one hears of the sorcerers extracting from their own bodies by passes and manipulations a magical essence called 'boylya,' which they can make to enter the patient's body like pieces of quartz, which causes pain there and consumes the flesh, and may be magically extracted either as invisible or in the form of a bit of quartz. Even the spirit of the waters, 'nguk-wonga,' which had caused an attack of erysipelas in a boy's leg (he had been bathing too long when heated) is declared to have been extracted by the conjurers from the affected part in the shape of a sharp stone. The Caribs, who very distinctly referred diseases to the action of hostile demons or deities, had a similar sorcerer's process of extracting thorns or splinters from the affected part as the peccant causes, and it is said that in the Antilles morsels of stone and bone so extracted were wrapped up in cotton by the women, as protective fetishes in childbirth. The Malagasy, considering all diseases as inflicted by an evil spirit, consult a diviner, whose method is often to remove the disease by means of a 'faditra;' this is some object, such as a little grass, ashes, a sheep, a pumpkin, the water the patient has rinsed his mouth with, or what not, and when the priest has counted on it the evils