Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/289

 true in the case of the Messalians, whom Dr. Tylor tells us spat and blew their noses to expel the demons they had drawn in with their breath, and might partly explain one or two others of the cases I have mentioned. Another explanation is that people spit to show their humility, and the believers in this idea point to the case mentioned by Pliny of spitting in one's own breast when one craves pardon of the gods for any particularly audacious request. It may partially explain this particular instance.

But I do not think that either of these theories will explain the reason of the Masai spitting on his bullock, and Mr. Thompson's men on the beads; nor will they explain the reason why the mere act of the stranger's spitting on a baby when he looks at it, should at once free him of all suspicion of desiring to bewitch it. The last instance is particularly curious, for one would imagine, that if an individual is suspected of entertaining malevolent designs, the less one has to do with him the better. And that above all things, such a very magical thing as his saliva should be tabooed instead of welcomed. It seems to me that the only theory that will answer this somewhat anomalous case, and explain the majority of the cases we meet with, is that at one time the life of a man must have once been generally believed to have been bound up in his saliva; just as it can be shown that the life of a man has been very generally believed to have been bound up in his blood. And that therefore the spitting rite is a parallel to the blood rite.

This is what Professor Robertson Smith says about the latter: "The notion that by eating the flesh, or particularly by drinking the blood of another human being, a man absorbs its nature or life into its own, is one which appears among primitive peoples in many forms. It lies at the root of the widespread practice of drinking the fresh blood of enemies, and also of the habit observed by many savage huntsmen of eating some part of dangerous carnivora, in order that the courage of the animal may pass into them. But the most notable application of the idea is in the rite of blood brotherhood, examples of which are found all over the world. In the simplest form of the rite two men become brothers by opening their veins and sucking one another's blood. Thenceforth their lives are not two, but one. . . . This