Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/145

Rh to suppose that the belief in the mysterious influences of the Evil Eye flows from the knowledge of what the eye can do as an instrument of the will, while experience has not yet set such limits as we recognize to the range of its action. The horror which savages so often have of being looked full in the face, is quite consistent with this feeling. You may look at him or his, but you must not stare, and above all, you must not look him full in the face, that is to say, you must not do just what the stronger mind does when it uses the eye as an instrument to force its will upon the weaker.

It is clear that the superstitions which have been cursorily described in this chapter, are no mere casual extravagances of the human mind. The way in which the magic arts have taken to themselves the verb to "do," as claiming to be " doing," par excellence, sometimes gives us an opportunity of testing their importance in the popular mind. As in Madagascar sorcerers and diviners go by the name of mpiasa, and in British Columbia of ooshtuk-yu, both terms meaning "workers," so words in the languages of our Aryan race show a like transition. In Sanskrit, magic has possessed itself of a whole family of words derived from kr, to "do," krtya, sorcery, krtvan, enchanting, (literally, working,) kârmana, enchantment (from karman, a deed, work), and so on, while Latin facere has produced in the Romance languages Italian fattura, enchantment, old French faiture, Portuguese feitiço (whence fetish), and a dozen more, and Grimm holds that the most probable derivation of zauber, Old High German zoupar, is from zouwan, Gothic táujan, to do, as modern German anthun means to bewitch, and other like etymologies are to be found. The belief and practices to which such words refer form a compact and organic whole, mostly developed from a state of mind in which subjective and objective connexions are not yet clearly separated. What then does this mass of evidence show from the ethnologist's point of view; what is the position of sorcery in the history of mankind?

When Dr. Martius, the Bavarian traveller, was lying one