Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/130

120 West Africa; in Siam the doctor makes an image of clay, sends his patient's disease into it, and then takes it away to the woods and buries it; while the Tunguz cures his leg or his heart by wearing a carved model of the part affected about him.

The transfer of life or the qualities of a living being to an image may be made by giving it a name, or by the performance of a ceremony over it. Thus, at the festival of the Durga Pûja, the officiating Brahman touches the cheeks, eyes, breast, and forehead of each of the images that have been prepared, and says, "Let the soul of Durga long continue in happiness in this image." Till life is thus given to them, they may not be worshipped. But the mere making of the image of a living creature is very commonly sufficient to set up at once its connexion with life, among races who have not thoroughly passed out of the state of mind to which these practices belong. Looking at the matter from a very different point of view, and yet with the same feeling of a necessary connexion between life and the image of the living creature, the Moslem holds that he who makes an image in this world will have it set before him on the day of judgment, and will be called upon to give it life, but he will fail to finish the work he has thus left half done, and will be sent to expiate his offence in hell.

With such illustrations to show how widely spread and deeply rooted is the belief that there is a real connexion between a being and its image, we can see how almost inevitable it is, that man at a low stage of education should come to confound the image with that which it was made to represent. The strong craving of the human mind for a material support to the religious sentiment has produced idols and fetishes over most parts of the world, and at most periods in its history; and while the more intelligent, even among many low tribes, have often clearly enough taken the images as mere symbols of superhuman beings, the vulgar have commonly believed that the idols themselves had life and supernatural powers.