Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/292

254 schoolmates spat their faith. So, just as the Unyamuezi commingle their blood, so the Newcastle collier, the Hungarian gipsy, the ancient Scandinavian, and the North Country school-boy commingle their saliva at the making of their solemn compacts. May we not infer that both practices are due to a common belief in the interchange of life, and therefore of the making of the interests of both parties identical? But it may be objected that, in by far the larger number of cases we meet with, the spitting is entirely one-sided, and there appears to be no trace of its ever having been mutual. Precisely the same thing takes place in the case of blood under certain circumstances, when, for instance, the persons are relatives. For example, we are told that the Carib father, on the birth of his child, is accustomed to let some of his blood trickle over it, in order to hand on the strong pure life of the clan to the puny little infant; and the Australians, at their initiation ceremonies, either let the blood of old tribesmen flow over the novices, or else give it to them to drink, with the same meaning. If the one-sidedness of the bleeding does not vitiate the life-theory in blood, neither ought the one-sidedness of the spitting to vitiate the life-theory in the case of the saliva.

Now if we look over the instances of one-sided spitting, we will find that many of them take place between relatives. For instance, we are told that Mahomet, when Hassan his grandson was born, spat in his mouth. With the Carib practice before us, we can hardly doubt but that the motive is the same. We also read that, at the conferring of its prænomen upon a Roman child, part of the ceremony consisted in the aunt or grandmother lustrating the child with her saliva. It is true that in the last example we are told that it was believed that the lustration prevented the child from being bewitched ; but this, I think, instead of weakening my plea, that the original idea of the ceremony was the handing on of the family life, considerably strengthens my position. For if we reflect that the general symptoms of a case of bewitchment are the gradual wasting away of the person bewitched, and enormous diminution of vital energy, owing to the magical withdrawal of the bewitched person's