Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/401

 tives. It may happen, by a mere coincidence, that the victim falls more or less seriously ill within a few weeks of the initial operations. As black magic is often advertised and always suspected, the illness is put down to its influence. If it be known that a powerful sorcerer, in the pay of a chief, is at work, suggestion may have a serious effect on the victim. It does not follow that he gives in utterly and dies, but I suspect that this occasionally happens.1 As a rule, however, if pressed hard, the victim will mobilize all the forces of defence. He will put counter-magic in operation; set armed watches at night around him; move away to another place, change his diet, and observe all the taboos and other conditions of recovery. Thus we have the interplay of two forces in the imagination of the patient, corresponding to the inter-play of the two real forces in his organism: resistance and disease. The progress of the system of magic, accompanied by the progress of the system of counter-magic, proceed side by side with the struggle between the organism and the invading forces of bacteria or malignant changes. Once the sorcerer has determined on black magic, or has received payment for it, he has to go through the whole repertory from the initial formula to

1 I have no well-attested instance in my notes, but several cases of rapid wasting disease have appeared to me to belong to this category. Examples of people dying from sheer conviction that a broken taboo has a lethal influence, or that black magic, too powerful to be counteracted, has been set in motion against them, are numerous in ethnographic literature. The argument in the text does not rest on the assumption, however, that what might be called psychological death from sorcery is inevitable. It rests rather on the principle which we can regard as established by modern psycho-therapy that a conviction of good and bad influences working upon the patient's health is a most powerful element in the treatment. Cf. P. Janet, Les Medications Psycholoffigues, 1920.

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