Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/167

Rh snake carried in a bag on his horse's back; the hero finds out the secret and kills the snake, and then the giant dies too. This tale is curious, as very likely indicating the original sense of a well-known group of stories in European folklore, the Scandinavian one, for instance, where the giant cannot be made an end of, because he keeps his heart not in his body, but in a duck's egg in a well far away; at last the young champion finds the egg and crushes it, and the giant bursts. Following the notion of soul-embodiment into civilized times, we learn that 'A ghost may be laid for any term less than an hundred years, and in any place or body, full or empty; as, a solid oak — the pommel of a sword — a barrel of beer, if a yeoman or simple gentleman — or a pipe of wine, if an esquire or a justice.' This is from Grose's bantering description in the 18th century of the art of 'laying' ghosts, and it is one of the many good instances of articles of serious savage belief surviving as jests among civilized men.

Thus other spiritual beings, roaming free about the world, find fetish-objects to act through, to embody themselves in, to present them visibly to their votaries. It is extremely difficult to draw a distinct line of separation between the two prevailing sets of ideas relating to spiritual action through what we call inanimate objects. Theoretically we can distinguish the notion of the object acting as it were by the will and force of its own proper soul or spirit, from the notion of some foreign spirit entering its substance or acting on it from without, and so using it as a body or instrument. But in practice these conceptions blend almost inextricably. This state of things is again a confirmation of the theory of animism here advanced, which treats both sets of ideas as similar developments of the same original