Theft is not only punished by men, but is supposed to be avenged by supernatural powers. The Alfura of Halmahera are said to be honest only because they fear that they otherwise would be subject to the punishment of spirits.152 The natives of Efate, in the New Hebrides, maintained that theft was condemned by their gods.153 In Aneiteum, another island belonging to the same group, thieves were supposed to be punished after death.154 In Netherland Island they were said to go to a prison of darkness under the earth;155 according to the beliefs of the Banks Islanders they were excluded from the true Panoi or Paradise.156 On the Gold Coast, “if a man had property stolen from his house, he might go to the priest of the local deity he was accustomed to worship, state the loss that had befallen him, make an offering of a fowl, rum, and eggs, and ask the priest to supplicate the god to punish the thief.”157 In Southern Guinea fetishes are inaugurated to detect and punish certain kinds of theft, and persons who are cognisant of such crimes and do not give information about them are also liable to be punished by the fetish.158 The Bechuanas speak of an unknown being, vaguely called by the name of Lord and Master of things (Mongalinto), who punishes theft. One of them said: “When it thunders every one trembles; if there are several together, one asks the other with uneasiness, Is there any one amongst us who devours the wealth of others? All then spit on the ground saying, We do not devour the wealth of others. If a thunderbolt strikes and kills one of them, no one complains, no one weeps; instead of being grieved, all unite in saying that the Lord is delighted (that is to say, he has done right) with killing that man; we also say that the thief eats thunderbolts, that is to say, does things which draw down upon men such judgments.”159

According to the Zoroastrian Yasts, Rashnu Razista was “the best killer, smiter, destroyer of thieves and bandits.”160 In Greece Zeus κτήσιος was a guardian of the family property;161 and according to a Roman tradition the domestic god repulsed the robber and kept off the enemy.162 The removing of landmarks has frequently been regarded as sacrilegious.163 It was strictly prohibited by the religious law of the Hebrews.164 In Greece boundaries were protected by Zeus ὅριος. Plato says in his ‘Laws’:—“Let no one shift the boundary line either of a fellow-citizen who is a neighbour, or, if he dwells at the extremity of the land, of any stranger who is conterminous with him…. Every one should be more willing to move the largest rock which is not a land mark, than the least stone which is the sworn mark of friendship and hatred between neighbours; for Zeus, the god of kindred, is the witness of the citizen, and Zeus, the god of strangers, of the stranger, and when aroused terrible are the wars which they stir up. He who obeys the law will never know the fatal consequences of disobedience, but he who despises the law shall be liable to a double penalty, the first coming from the Gods, and the second from the law.”165 The Romans worshipped Terminus or Jupiter Terminalis as the god of boundaries.166 According to an old tradition, Numa directed that every one should mark the bounds of his landed property by stones consecrated to Jupiter, that yearly sacrifices should be offered to them at the festival of the Terminalia, and that, “if any person demolished or displaced these bound-stones, he should be looked upon as devoted to this god, to the end that anybody might kill him as a sacrilegious person with impunity and without being defiled with guilt.”167 In the higher religions theft of any kind is frequently condemned as a sin.

This religious sanction given to ownership is no doubt in some measure due to the same circumstances as, in certain cases, make morality in general a matter of divine concern—a subject which will be dealt with in a future chapter. But there are also special reasons which account for it. Partly it has its origin in magic practices, particularly in the curse.

Cursing is a frequent method of punishing criminals who cannot be reached in any other way.168 In the Book of Judges we read of Micah’s mother who had pronounced a curse with reference to the money stolen from her, and afterwards, when her son had confessed his guilt, hastened to render it ineffective by a blessing.169 In early Arabia the owner of stolen property had recourse to cursing in order to recover what he had lost.170 In Samoa “the party from whom anything had been stolen, if he knew not the thief, would seek satisfaction in sitting down and deliberately cursing him.”171 The Kamchadales “think they can punish an undiscovered theft by burning the sinews of the stonebuck in a publick meeting with great ceremonies of conjuration, believing that as these sinews are contracted by the fire so the thief will have all his limbs contracted.”172 Among the Ossetes, if an object has been secretly stolen, its owner secures the assistance of a sorcerer. They proceed together to the house of any person whom they suspect, the sorcerer carrying under his arm a cat, which is regarded as a particularly enchanted animal. He exclaims, “If thou hast stolen the article and dost not restore it to its owner, may this cat torment the souls of thy ancestors!” And such an imprecation is generally followed by a speedy restitution of the stolen property. Again, if their suspicions rest upon no particular individual, they proceed in the same manner from house to house, and the thief then, knowing that his turn must come, frequently confesses his guilt at once.173 A common mode of detecting the perpetrator of a theft is to compel the suspected individual to make oath, that is to say, to pronounce a conditional curse upon himself.174

Cursing is resorted to not only for the purpose of punishing thieves or compelling them to restore what they have stolen, but also as a means of preventing theft. In the South Sea Islands it is a common practice to protect property by making it taboo, and the tabooing of an object is, as Dr. Codrington puts it, “a prohibition with a curse expressed or implied.”175 The curse is then, in many cases, deposited in some article which is attached to the thing or place it is intended to protect. The mark of taboo, in Polynesia called rahui or raui, sometimes consists of a cocoa-nut leaf plaited in a particular way,176 sometimes of a wooden image of a man or a carved post stuck in the ground,177 sometimes of a bunch of human hair or a piece of an old mat,178 and so forth. In Samoa there were various forms of taboo which formed a powerful check on stealing, especially from plantations and fruit-trees, and each was known by a special name indicating the sort of curse which the owner wished would fall on the thief. Thus, if a man desired that a sea-pike should run into the body of the person who attempted to steal, say, his bread-fruits, he would plait some cocoa-nut leaflets in the form of a sea-pike, and suspend it from one or more of the trees which he wanted to protect. This was called the “sea-pike taboo”; and any ordinary thief would be terrified to touch a tree from which this was suspended, believing that, if he did so, a fish of the said description would dart up and mortally wound him the next time he went to the sea. The “white shark taboo” was done by plaiting a cocoa-nut leaf in the form of a shark, and was tantamount to an expressed imprecation that the thief might be devoured by the white shark when he went to fish. The “cross-stick taboo,” again, consisted of a stick suspended horizontally from the tree, and meant that any thief touching the tree would have a disease running right across his body and remaining fixed there till he died.179 Exactly equivalent to the taboo of the Pacific Islanders is the pomali of the natives of Timor; “a few palm leaves stuck outside a garden as a sign of the pomali will preserve its produce from thieves as effectually as the threatening notice of man-traps, spring-guns, or a savage dog, would do with us.”180 Among the Santals, whenever a person “is desirous of protecting a patch of jungle from the axes of the villagers, or a patch of grass from being grazed over, or a newly sown field from being trespassed upon, he erects a bamboo in his patch of grass or field, to which is affixed a tuft of straw, or in the case of jungle some prominent and lofty tree has the same prohibitory mark attached, which mark is well understood and strictly observed by all parties interested.”181 So also in Madagascar “on rencontre sur les chemins, on voit dans les champs de longs bâtons munis à leur sommet d’un paquet d’herbes et qui sont plantés en terre soit pour interdire le passage du terrain soit pour indiquer que les récoltes sont réservées à l’usage d’individus déterminés.”182 Among the Washambala the owner of a field sometimes puts a stick wound round with a banana leaf on the road to it, believing that anybody who without permission enters the field “will be subject to the curse of this charm.”183 The Wadshagga protect a doorless hut against burglars by placing a banana leaf over the threshold, and any maliciously inclined person who dares to step over it is supposed to get ill or die.184 The Akka “stick an arrow in a bunch of bananas still on the stalk to mark it as their own when ripe,” and then not even the owner of the tree would think of touching the fruit so claimed by others.185 Of the Barotse we are told that “when they do not want a thing touched they spit on straws and stick them all about the object.”186 When a Balonda has placed a beehive on a tree, he ties a “piece of medicine” round the trunk, and this will prove sufficient protection against thieves.187 Jacob of Edessa tells us of a Syrian priest who wrote a curse and hung it on a tree, that nobody might eat the fruit.188 In the early days of Islam a masterful man reserved water for his own use by hanging pieces of fringe of his red blanket on a tree beside it, or by throwing them into the pool;189 and in modern Palestine nobody dares to touch the piles of stones which are placed on the boundaries of landed property.190 The old inhabitants of Cumaná on the Caribbean Sea used to mark off their plantations by a single cotton thread, in the belief that anybody tampering with these boundary marks would speedily die.191 A similar idea seems still to prevail among the Indians of the Amazon. Among the Jurís a traveller noticed that in places where the hedge surrounding a field was broken, it was replaced by a cotton string; and when Brazilian Indians leave their huts they often wind a piece of the same material round the latch of the door.192 Sometimes they also hang baskets, rags, or flaps of bark on their landmarks.193 In these and in various other instances just referred to it is not expressly stated that the taboo mark embodies a curse, but their similarity to cases in which it does so is striking enough to preclude much doubt about their real meaning. It is true that an object which is sacred by itself may, on that account, protect everything in its neighbourhood;194 in Morocco any article deposited in the ḥorm of a saint is safe, and among pagan Africans the same effect is produced by using fetishes as protectors of fields or houses.195 But a thing of inherent holiness may also be chosen for taboo purposes for the reason that its sanctity is supposed to give particular efficacy to any curse with which it may be loaded.

We have previously noticed another method of charging a curse with magic energy, namely, by giving it the form of an appeal to a supernatural being.196 So also spirits or gods are frequently invoked in curses referring to theft. On the Gold Coast, “when the owner of land sees that some one has been making a clearing on his land, he cuts the young inner branches of the palm tree and hangs them about the place where the trespass has been committed. As he hangs each leaf he says something to the following effect: ‘The person who did this and did not make it known to me before he did it, if he comes here to do any other thing, may fetish Katawere (or Tanor or Fofie or other fetish) kill him and all his family.’”197 In Samoa, in the case of a theft, the suspected persons had to swear before the chiefs, each one invoking the village god to send swift destruction if he had committed the crime; and if all had sworn and the culprit was still undiscovered, the chiefs solemnly made a similar invocation on behalf of the thief.198 The Hawaiians seem likewise to have appealed to an avenging deity in certain cursing ceremonies, which they performed for the purpose of detecting or punishing thieves.199 In ancient Greece it was a custom to dedicate a lost article to a deity, with a curse for those who kept it.200 Of the Melanesian taboo, again, Dr. Codrington observes that the power at the back of it “is that of the ghost or spirit in whose name, or in reliance upon whom, it is pronounced.”201 In Ceylon, “to prevent fruit being stolen, the people hang up certain grotesque figures around the orchard and dedicate it to the devils, after which none of the native Ceylonese will dare even to touch the fruit on any account. Even the owner will not venture to use it till it be first liberated from the dedication.”202 On the landmarks of the ancient Babylonians, generally consisting of stone pillars in the form of a phallus, imprecations were inscribed with appeals to various deities. One of these boundary stones contains the following curse directed against the violator of its sacredness:—“Upon this man may the great gods Anu, Bêl, Ea, and Nusku, look wrathfully, uproot his foundation, and destroy his offspring”; and similar invocations are then made to many other gods.203

Now we can understand why gods so frequently take notice of offences against property. They are invoked in curses uttered against thieves; the invocation in a curse easily develops into a genuine prayer, and where this is the case the god is supposed to punish the offender of his own free will. Besides, he may be induced to do so by offerings. And when often appealed to in connection with theft, a supernatural being may finally come to be looked upon as a guardian of property. This, for instance, I take to be the explanation of the belief prevalent among the Berbers of Ḥaḥa, in Southern Morocco, that some of the local saints punish thieves who approach their sanctuaries, even though the theft was committed elsewhere; being constantly appealed to in oaths taken by persons suspected of theft, they have become the permanent enemies of thieves. We can, further, understand why in some cases certain offences against property have actually assumed the character of a sacrilege, even apart from such as are committed in the proximity of a supernatural being. Curses are sometimes personified and elevated to the rank of divine agents; this, as we have seen, is the origin of the Erinyes of parents, beggars, and strangers, and of the Roman divi parentum and dii hospitales; and this is also in all probability the origin of the god Terminus.204 Or the curse may be transformed into an attribute of the chief god, not only because he is frequently appealed to in connection with offences of a certain kind, but also because such a god has a tendency to attract supernatural forces which are in harmony with his general nature. This explains the origin of conceptions such as Zeus ὅριος and Jupiter Terminalis, as well as the extreme severity with which Yahweh treated the removal of landmarks. In all these cases there are indications of a connection between the god and a curse. Apart from other evidence to be found in Semitic antiquities, there is the anathema of Deuteronomy, “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.”205 That the boundary stones dedicated to Zeus ὅριος were originally charged with imprecations appears from a passage in Plato’s ‘Laws’ quoted above,206 as also from inscriptions made on them.207 The Etruscans cursed anyone who should touch or displace a boundary mark:—Such a person shall be condemned by the gods; his house shall disappear; his race shall be extinguished; his limbs shall be covered with ulcers and waste away; his land shall no longer produce fruits; hail, rust, and the fires of the dog-star shall destroy his harvests.208 Considering the important part played by blood as a conductor of imprecations, it is not improbable that the Roman ceremony of letting the blood of a sacrificial animal flow into the hole where the landmark was to be placed209 was intended to give efficacy to a curse. In some parts of England a custom of annually “beating the bounds” of a parish has survived up to the present time, and this ceremony was formerly accompanied by religious services, in which a clergyman invoked curses on him who should transgress the bounds of his neighbour, and blessings on him who should regard the landmarks.210