In ancient Peru, an Inca, after confession of guilt, bathed in a neighbouring river, and repeated this formula:—“O thou River, receive the sins I have this day confessed unto the Sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear.”174 According to Vedic beliefs, sin is a contamination which may be inherited, or contracted in various ways,175 and of which the sinner tries to rid himself by transferring it to some enemy,176 or by invoking the gods of water or fire.177 It is washed out by Varuna, in his capacity of a water-god,178 and by Trita, another water-god,179 and even by “the Waters” in general, as appears from the prayer addressed to them:—“O Waters, carry off whatever sin is in me and untruth.”180 For a similar reason, as it seems, water became in the later, Brahmanic age, the “essence (sap) of immortality”181 and the belief in its purifying power still survives in modern India. No sin is too heinous to be removed, no character too black to be washed clean, by the waters of Ganges.182 At sacred places of pilgrimage on the banks of rivers, the Hindus perform special religious shavings for the purpose of purifying soul and body from pollution; and persons who have committed great crimes or are troubled by uneasy consciences, travel hundreds of miles to such holy places where “they may be released from every sin by first being relieved of every hair and then plunging into the sacred stream.”183 So, also, according to Hindu beliefs, contact with cows purifies, and, as in the Parsi ritual, the dung and urine of cows have the power of preventing or cleansing away not only material, but moral defilements.184 In post-Homeric Greece, individuals and a whole people were cleansed from their sins by water or some other material means of purification.185 Plutarch, after observing that “there are other properties that have connection and communication, and that transfer themselves from one thing to another with incredible quickness and over immense distances,” asks whether it is “more wonderful that Athens should have been smitten with a plague which started in Arabia, than that, when the Delphians and Sybarites became wicked, vengeance should have fallen on their descendants.”186 The Hebrews annually laid the sins of the people upon the head of a goat, and sent it away into the wilderness;187 and they cleansed every impurity with consecrated water or the sprinkling of blood.188 To this day, the Jews in Morocco, on their New-Year’s day, go to the sea-shore, or to some spring, and remove their sins by throwing stones into the water. The words of the Psalmist, “wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,”189 were not altogether a figure of speech; nor is Christian baptism originally a mere symbol. Its result is forgiveness of sins;190 by the water, as a medium of the Holy Ghost, “the stains of sin are washed away.”191 That sin is contagious has been expressly stated by Christian writers. Novatian says that “the one is defiled by the sin of the other, and the idolatry of the transgressor passes over to him who does not transgress.”192

In this materialistic conception of sin there is an obvious confusion between cause and effect, between the sin and its punishment. Sin is looked upon as a substance charged with injurious energy, which will sooner or later discharge itself to the discomfort or destruction of anybody who is infected with it. The sick Chinese says of his disease, “it is my sin,” instead of saying, “it is the punishment of my sin.”193 Both in Hebrew and in the Vedic language the word for sin is used in a similar way.194 “In the consciousness of the pious Israelite,” Professor Schultz observes, “sin, guilt, and punishment, are ideas so directly connected that the words for them are interchangeable.”195 The prophets frequently and emphatically declare that there is in sin itself a power which must destroy the sinner.196 So, too, as M. Bergaigne points out, there is in the Vedic notion of sin, “la croyance à une sorte de vertu propre du péché, grâce à laquelle il produit de lui-même son effet nécessaire, à savoir le châtiment du pécheur.”197 Sins are thus treated like diseases, or the germs of diseases, of which patients likewise try to rid themselves by washing or burning, or which are described in the very language often applied to sins as fetters which hold them chained.198 All kinds of evil are in this way materialised. The Shamanistic peoples of Siberia, says Georgi, “hold evil to be a self-existing substance which they call by an infinitude of particular names.”199 According to Moorish ideas, l-bas, or “misfortune,” is a kind of infection, which may be contracted by contact and removed by water or fire; hence in all parts of Morocco water- and fire-ceremonies are performed annually, either on the ʿâshur-eve or at midsummer, l-ʿanṣara, for the purpose of purifying men, animals, and fruit-trees.200 And just as the Moors, on these occasions, rid themselves of l-bas, so, in modern Greece, the women make a fire on Midsummer Eve, and jump over it, crying, “I leave my sins.”201

Closely connected with the primitive conception of sin, is that of a curse. In fact, the injurious energy attributed to a sinful act, is in many cases obviously due to the curse of a god. The curse is looked upon as a baneful substance, as a miasma which injures or destroys anybody to whom it cleaves. The curse of Moses was said to lie on mount Ebal, ready to descend with punishments whenever there was an occasion for it.202 The Arabs, when being cursed, sometimes lay themselves down on the ground so that the curse, instead of hitting them, may fly over their bodies.203 According to Teutonic notions, curses alight, settle, cling, they take flight, and turn home as birds to their nests.204 It is the vulgar opinion in Ireland “that a curse once uttered must alight on something: it will float in the air seven years, and may descend any moment on the party it was aimed at; if his guardian angel but forsake him, it takes forthwith the shape of some misfortune, sickness or temptation, and strikes his devoted head.”205 We shall later on see that curses are communicated through material media. In some parts of Morocco, if a man is not powerful enough to avenge an infringement on his marriage-bed, he leaves seven tufts of hair on his head and goes to another tribe to ask for help. This is l-ʿâr, a conditional curse, which is first seated in the tufts, and from there transferred to those whom he invokes. Similarly, a person under the vow of blood-revenge lets his hair grow until he has fulfilled his vow. The oath clings to his hair, and will fall upon his head if he violates it.206

Generally, a curse follows the course which is indicated by the curser. But it does not do so in every case, and it has a tendency to spread. In ancient India207 and among the Arabs208 and Hebrews,209 there was a belief that a curse, especially if it was undeserved, might fall back on the head of him who uttered it. The same belief prevailed, or still prevails, among the Irish;210 so, also, according to an English proverb, “curses, like chickens, come home to roost.” According to Plato, the curse of a father or mother taints everything with which it comes in contact. Any one who is found guilty of assaulting a parent, shall be for ever banished from the city into the country, and shall abstain from the temples; and “if any freeman eat or drink, or have any other sort of intercourse with him, or only meeting him have voluntarily touched him, he shall not enter into any temple, nor into the agora, nor into the city, until he is purified; for he should consider that he has become tainted by a curse.”211 Plutarch asks whether Jupiter’s priest was forbidden to swear for the reason that “the peril of perjury would reach in common to the whole commonwealth, if a wicked, godless, and forsworn person should have the charge and superintendence of the prayers, vows, and sacrifices made on behalf of the city.”212 The Romans believed that certain horrid imprecations had such power, that not only the object of them never escaped their influence, but that the person who used them also was sure to be unhappy.213 Among the Arinzes, an oath is reckoned a terrible thing:—“They do not suffer a person, who has been under the necessity of expurgating himself in so dreadful a manner, to remain among them: he is sent into exile.”214 According to Bedouin notions, a solemn oath should only be taken at a certain distance from the camp, “because the magical nature of the oath might prove pernicious to the general body of Arabs, were it to take place in their vicinity.”215 “To take an oath of any sort,” says Burckhardt, “is always a matter of great concern among the Bedouins. It seems as if they attached to an oath consequences of a supernatural kind…. A Bedouin, even in defence of his own right, will seldom be persuaded to take a solemn oath before a kadhy, or before the tomb of a sheikh or saint, as they are sometimes required to do; and would rather forfeit a small sum than expose himself to the dreaded consequences of an oath.”216 Exactly the same holds good for the Moors. The conditional self-curse is supposed in some degree to pollute the swearer even though the condition referred to in the oath be only imaginary, in other words, though he do not perjure himself. This, I think, is the reason why, among the Berbers in the South of Morocco, persons who have been wrongly accused of a crime, sometimes entirely undress themselves in the sanctuary where they are going to swear. They believe that, if they do so, the saint will punish the accuser; and I conclude that at the bottom of this belief there is a vague idea that the absence of all clothes will prevent the oath from clinging to themselves. They say that it is bad not only to swear, but even to be present when an oath is taken by somebody else. And at Demnat, in the Great Atlas, I was told that when a person has made oath at a shrine, he avoids going back to his house the same way as he came, since otherwise, at least if he has sworn false, his family as well as himself would have to suffer.

If a curse is infectious, it is naturally liable to contaminate those who derive their origin from the infected individual. The house of Glaucus was utterly extirpated from Sparta, in accordance with the words of the oracle, “There is a nameless son of the Oath-god who has neither hands nor feet; he pursues swiftly, until, having seized, he destroys the whole race, and all the house.”217 So, too, the Erinyes visited the sins of the fathers even on the children and grandchildren;218 and the Erinyes were originally only personifications of curses.219 It is said in the Ecclesiasticus:—“A man that useth much swearing shall be filled with iniquity, and the plague shall never depart from his house…. If he swear in vain, he shall not be innocent, but his house shall be full of calamities.”220 Casalis remarks of the Basutos, that “the dreadful consequences that the curse of Noah has had for Ham and his descendants appear quite natural to these people.”221 The Dharkâr and Majhwâr in Mirzapur, believe that a person who forswears himself will lose his property and his children;222 but as we do not know the contents of the oath, it is possible that the destruction of the latter is not ascribed to mere contagion, but is expressly imprecated on them by the swearer.223 Among the Rejangs of Sumatra, “any accident that happens to a man, who has been known to take a false oath, or to his children or grandchildren, is carefully recorded in memory, and attributed to this sole cause.”224 Among the Karens the following story is told:—“Anciently there was a man who had ten children, and he cursed one of his brethren, who had done him no injury; but the curse did the man no harm, and he did not die. Then the curse returned to the man who sent it, and all his ten children died.”225 The Moors are fond of cursing each other’s father or mother, or grandfather, or grandfather’s father, such a curse being understood to involve their descendants as well. The Rev. R. Taylor says of the Maoris, “To bid you go and cook your father would be a great curse, but to tell a person to go and cook his great-grandfather would be far worse, because it included every individual who has sprung from him.”226

Thus, from the conception that sins and curses are contagious it follows that an innocent person may have to suffer for the sin of another. His suffering does not necessarily relieve the sinner from punishment; sin, like an infectious disease, may spread without vacating the seat of infection. But, as we have seen, it may also be transferred, and sin-transference involves vicarious suffering. At the same time, this kind of vicarious suffering must not be confounded with vicarious expiatory sacrifice. As a general rule, the scapegoat is driven or cast away, not killed. The exceptions to this rule seem to be due to two different causes. On the one hand, the scapegoat may be chased to death, or perhaps be pushed over a precipice,227 for the sake of ridding the community as effectively as possible of the evils loaded on the victim. Thus the Bhotiyás of Juhár take a dog, make him drunk, “and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and stones, and believe that by so doing no disease or misfortune will visit the village during the year.”228 On the other hand, the transference of evil may be combined with a sacrifice. But of such a combination only a few instances are recorded, and most of them are ambiguous. Considering further that in these cases, or at least in the best known of them, the act of transference takes place after the victim has been killed, it seems to me extremely probable that we have here to do with a fusion of two distinct rites into one, and that the victim is not offered up as a sacrifice in its capacity of a scapegoat, but, once sacrificed, has been made use of as a conductor for all the evils with which the people are beset.

In his list of scapegoats, Dr. Frazer refers to a case of human sacrifice witnessed by the Rev. J. C. Taylor at Onitsha, on the Niger.229 A young woman was drawn, with her face to the earth, from the king’s house to the river. As the people drew her along, they cried, “Wickedness! wickedness!” so as to notify to the passers-by to screen themselves from witnessing the dismal scene. The sacrifice was to take away the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a merciless manner “as if the weight of all their wickedness were thus carried away”; and it was finally drowned in the river. Our informant also heard that there was a man killed, as a sacrifice for the sins of the king. “Thus two human beings were offered as sacrifices, to propitiate their heathen deities, thinking that they would thus atone for the individual sins of those who had broken God’s laws during the past year…. Those who had fallen into gross sins during the past year—such as incendiarisms, thefts, fornications, adulteries, witchcrafts, incests, slanders, &c.—were expected to pay in twenty-eight ngugus, or £2 0s. 7½d., as a fine; and this money was taken into the interior, to purchase two sickly persons, to be offered as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes—one for the land, and one for the river.”230 As will be seen in a following chapter, human sacrifices to rivers are very common in the Niger country. In the cases mentioned by the English missionary, the idea of vicarious expiation is obvious. But I find no evidence of actual sin-transference.