§ 2. Homeopathic or Imitative Magic

Perhaps the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few instances out of many may be given to prove at once the wide diffusion of the practice over the world and its remarkable persistence through the ages. For thousands of years ago it was known to the sorcerers of ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome,​[192] and at this day it is still resorted to by cunning and malignant savages in Australia, Africa, and Scotland. Thus the North American Indians, we are told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented.​[193] For example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain magic words as he does so.​[194] So when a Cora Indian {p56} of Mexico wishes to kill a man, he makes a figure of him out of burnt clay, strips of cloth, and so forth, and then, muttering incantations, runs thorns through the head or stomach of the figure to make his victim suffer correspondingly. Sometimes the Cora Indian makes a more beneficent use of this sort of homoeopathic magic. When he wishes to multiply his flocks or herds, he models a figure of the animal he wants in wax or clay, or carves it from tuff, and deposits it in a cave of the mountains; for these Indians believe that the mountains are masters of all riches, including cattle and sheep. For every cow, deer, dog, or hen he wants, the Indian has to sacrifice a corresponding image of the creature.​[195] This may help us to understand the meaning of the figures of cattle, deer, horses, and pigs which were dedicated to Diana at Nemi.​[196] They may have been the offerings of farmers or huntsmen who hoped thereby to multiply the cattle or the game. Similarly when the Todas of Southern India desire to obtain more buffaloes, they offer silver images of these animals in the temples.​[197] The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul. But they drew a delicate distinction between the kinds of materials to be used in the manufacture of these images, according as the victim was an Indian or a Viracocha, that is, a Spaniard. To kill an Indian they employed maize and the fat of a llama, to kill a Spaniard they used wheat and the fat of a pig, because Viracochas did not eat llamas and preferred wheat to maize.​[198] {p57}

A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows. Take parings of nails, hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim, enough to represent every part of his person, and then make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say:

After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die. This charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic and contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him, namely, his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay charm, which resembles the Ojebway practice still more closely, is to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees’ comb and of the length of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy {p58} is blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the head, and his head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards; enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that his blood may not be on your head, you should say:

Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than you are.​[199] In eastern Java an enemy may be killed by means of a likeness of him drawn on a piece of paper, which is then incensed or buried in the ground.​[200] Among the Minangkabauers of Sumatra a man who is tormented by the passion of hate or of unrequited love will call in the help of a wizard in order to cause the object of his hate or love to suffer from a dangerous ulcer known as a tinggam. After giving the wizard the necessary instructions as to the name, bodily form, dwelling, and family of the person in question, he makes a puppet which is supposed to resemble his intended victim; and repairs with it to a wood, where he hangs the image on a tree that stands quite by itself. Muttering a spell, he then drives an instrument through the navel of the puppet into the tree, till the sap of the tree oozes through the hole thus made. The instrument which inflicts the wound bears the same name (tinggam) as the ulcer which is to be raised on the body of the victim, and the oozing sap is believed to be his or her life-spirit. Soon afterwards the person against whom the charm is directed begins to suffer from an ulcer, which grows worse and worse till he dies, unless a friend can procure a piece of the wood of the tree to which the image is attached.​[201] {p59}

The sorcerers of Mabuiag or Jervis Island, in Torres Straits, kept an assortment of effigies in stock ready to be operated on at the requirement of a customer. Some of the figures were of stone; these were employed when short work was to be made of a man or woman. Others were wooden; these gave the unhappy victim a little more rope, only, however, to terminate his prolonged sufferings by a painful death. The mode of operation in the latter case was to put poison, by means of a magical implement, into a wooden image, to which the name of the intended victim had been given. Next day the person aimed at would feel chilly, then waste away and die, unless the same wizard who had wrought the charm would consent to undo it.​[202] If the sorcerer pulled off an arm or leg of the image, the human victim felt pain in the corresponding limb of his body; but if the sorcerer restored the severed arm or leg to the figure, the man recovered. Another mode of compassing a man’s death in Torres Straits was to prick a wax effigy of him or her with the spine of a sting-ray; so when the man whose name had been given to the waxen image next went afishing on the reef a sting-ray would sting him in the exact part of his body where the waxen image had been pierced. Or the sorcerer might hang the effigy on the bough of a tree, and as it swayed to and fro in the wind the person represented by it would fall sick. However, he would get well again if a friend of his could induce the magician to steady the figure by sticking it firmly in the sandy bottom of the sea.​[203] When the Lerons of Borneo wish to be revenged on an enemy, they make a wooden image of him and leave it in the jungle. As it decays, he dies.​[204] More elaborate is the proceeding adopted by the Kenyahs of Borneo in similar circumstances. The operator retires with the image to a quiet spot on the river bank, and when a hawk appears in a certain part of the sky, he kills a fowl, smears its blood on the image, and puts a bit of fat in the mouth of the figure, saying, “Put fat in his mouth.” By that he means, “May {p60} his head be cut off, hung up in an enemy’s house, and fed with fat in the usual way.” Then he strikes at the breast of the image with a small wooden spear, throws it into a pool of water reddened with red earth, and afterwards takes it out and buries it in the ground.​[205]

If an Aino of Japan desires to compass the destruction of an enemy, he will make a likeness of him out of mugwort or the guelder-rose and bury it in a hole upside down or under the trunk of a rotten tree, with a prayer to a demon to carry off the man’s soul or to make his body rot away with the tree. Sometimes an Aino woman will attempt to get rid of her husband in this fashion by wrapping up his head-dress in the shape of a corpse and burying it deep in the ground, while she breathes a prayer that her husband may rot and die with the head-dress.​[206] The Japanese themselves are familiar with similar modes of enchantment. In one of their ancient books we read of a rebellious minister who made figures of the heir to the throne with intent, no doubt, to do him grievous bodily harm thereby; and sometimes a woman who has been deserted by her lover will make a straw effigy of the faithless gallant and nail it to a sacred tree, adjuring the gods to spare the tree and to visit the sacrilege on the traitor. At a shrine of Kompira there stood a pine-tree studded with nails which had been thus driven in for the purpose of doing people to death.​[207] The Chinese also are perfectly aware that you can harm a man by maltreating or cursing an image of him, especially if you have taken care to write on it his name and horoscope. This mode of venting spite on an enemy is said to be commonly practised in China. In Amoy such images, roughly made of bamboo splinters and paper, are called “substitutes of persons” and may be bought very cheap for a cash or so apiece at any shop which sells paper articles for the use of the dead or the gods; for the frugal Chinese are in the habit of palming off paper imitations of all kinds of valuables on the simple-minded ghosts and gods, who take them in all good faith for the genuine articles. As {p61} usual, the victim suffers a hurt corresponding to the hurt done to his image. Thus if you run a nail or a needle into the eyes of the puppet, your man will go more or less blind; if you stick a pin in its stomach, he will be doubled up with colic; a stab in the heart of the effigy may kill him outright; and in general the more you prick it and the louder you speak the spell, the more certain is the effect. To make assurance doubly sure it is desirable to impregnate the effigy, so to say, with the personal influence of the man by passing it clandestinely beforehand over him or hiding it, unbeknown to him, in his clothes or under his bed. If you do that, he is quite sure to die sooner or later.​[208] Naturally these nefarious practices are no new thing in the Chinese empire. There is a passage in the Chinese Book of Rewards and Penalties which illustrates their prevalence in days gone by. There, under the rubric “To hide an effigy of a man for the purpose of giving him the nightmare,” we read as follows: “This means hiding the carved wooden effigy of a man somewhere with intent to give him the nightmare. Kong-sun-tcho having died suddenly some time after he had succeeded to the post of treasurer, he appeared in a dream to the governor of his district and said unto him: ‘I have been the victim of an odious crime, and I am come, my lord, to pray you to avenge me. My time to die had not yet come; but my servants gave me the nightmare, and I was choked in my sleep. If you will send secretly some dauntless soldiers, not one of the varlets will escape you. Under the seventh tile of the roof of my house will be found my image carved of wood. Fetch it and punish the criminals.’ Next day the governor of the district had all the servants arrested, and sure enough, after some search, they found under the aforesaid tile the figure of a man in wood, a foot high, and bristling all over with nails. Bit by bit the wood changed into flesh and uttered inarticulate cries when it was struck. The governor of the district immediately reported to the prefect of the department, who condemned several of the servants to suffer the extreme rigour of the law.”​[209] {p62}

When some of the aborigines of Victoria desired to destroy an enemy, they would occasionally retire to a lonely spot, and drawing on the ground a rude likeness of the victim would sit round it and devote him to destruction with cabalistic ceremonies. So dreaded was this incantation that men and women, who learned that it had been directed against them, have been known to pine away and die of fright.​[210] On the Bloomfield River in Queensland the natives think they can doom a man by making a rough wooden effigy of him and burying it in the ground, or by painting his likeness on a bull-roarer; and they believe that persons whose portraits are carved on a tree at Cape Bedford will waste away.​[211] When the wife of a Central Australian native has eloped from him and he cannot recover her, the disconsolate husband repairs with some sympathising friends to a secluded spot, where a man skilled in magic draws on the ground a rough figure supposed to represent the woman lying on her back. Beside the figure is laid a piece of green bark, which stands for her spirit or soul, and at it the men throw miniature spears which have been made for the purpose and charmed by singing over them. This barken effigy of the woman’s spirit, with the little spears sticking in it, is then thrown as far as possible in the direction which she is supposed to have taken. During the whole of the operation the men chant in a low voice, the burden of their song being an invitation to the magic influence to go out and enter her body and dry up all her fat. Sooner or later—often a good deal later—her fat does dry up, she dies, and her spirit is seen in the sky in the form of a shooting star.​[212]

In Burma a rejected lover sometimes resorts to a sorcerer and engages him to make a small image of the scornful fair one, containing a piece of her clothes, or of something which she has been in the habit of wearing. Certain charms or medicines also enter into the composition of the doll, which is then hung up or thrown into the water. As a {p63} consequence the girl is supposed to go mad.​[213] In this last example, as in the first of the Malay charms noticed above, homoeopathic or imitative magic is blent with contagious magic in the strict sense of the word, since the likeness of the victim contains something which has been in contact with her person. A Matabele who wishes to avenge himself on an enemy makes a clay figure of him and pierces it with a needle; next time the man thus represented happens to engage in a fight he will be speared, just as his effigy was stabbed.​[214] The Ovambo of South-western Africa believe that some people have the power of bewitching an absent person by gazing into a vessel full of water till his image appears to them in the water; then they spit at the image and curse the man, and that seals his fate.​[215]

The ancient books of the Hindoos testify to the use of similar enchantments among their remote ancestors. To destroy his foe a man would fashion a figure of him in clay and transfix it with an arrow which had been barbed with a thorn and winged with an owl’s feathers. Or he would mould the figure of wax and melt it in a fire. Sometimes effigies of the soldiers, horses, elephants, and chariots of a hostile army were modelled in dough, and then pulled in pieces.​[216] Again, to destroy an enemy the magician might kill a red-headed lizard with the words, “I am killing So-and-so,” smear it with blood, wrap it in a black cloth, and having pronounced an incantation burn it.​[217] Another way was to grind up mustard into meal, with which a figure was made of the person who was to be overcome or destroyed. Then having muttered certain spells to give efficacy to the rite, the enchanter chopped up the image, anointed it with melted butter, curds, or some such thing, and finally burnt it in a sacred pot.​[218] In the so-called “sanguinary chapter” of the Calica Puran there occurs the following passage: “On {p64} the autumnal Maha-Navami, or when the month is in the lunar mansion Scanda, or Bishácá, let a figure be made, either of barley-meal or earth, representing the person with whom the sacrificer is at variance, and the head of the figure be struck off; after the usual texts have been used, the following text is to be used in invoking an axe on the occasion: ‘Effuse, effuse blood; be terrific, be terrific; seize, destroy, for the love of Ambica, the head of this enemy.’”​[219]

In modern India the practices described in these old books are still carried on with mere variations of detail. The magician compounds the fatal image of earth taken from sixty-four filthy places, and mixed up with clippings of hair, parings of nails, bits of leather, and so on. Upon the breast of the image he writes the name of his enemy; then he pierces it through and through with an awl, or maims it in various ways, hoping thus to maim or kill the object of his vengeance.​[220] Among the Nambutiris of Malabar a figure representing the enemy to be destroyed is drawn on a small sheet of metal, gold by preference, on which some mystic diagrams are also inscribed. The sorcerer then declares that the bodily injury or death of the person shall take place at a certain time. After that he wraps up the little sheet in another sheet or leaf of metal (gold if possible), and buries it in a place where the victim is expected to pass. Sometimes instead of a small sheet of metal he buries a live frog or lizard enclosed in a coco-nut shell, after sticking nails into its eyes and stomach. At the same moment that the animal dies the person expires also.​[221] Among the Mohammedans of Northern India the proceeding is as follows. A doll is made of earth taken from a grave or from a place where bodies are cremated, and some sentences of the Coran are read backwards over twenty-one small wooden pegs. These pegs the operator next strikes into various parts of the body of the image, which is afterwards shrouded like a corpse, carried to a graveyard, and buried in the name of the enemy whom it is intended to injure. The man, it is {p65} believed, will die without fail after the ceremony.​[222] A slightly different form of the charm is observed by the Bâm-Margi, a very degraded sect of Hindoos in the North-West Provinces. To kill an enemy they make an image of flour or earth, and stick razors into the breast, navel, and throat, while pegs are thrust into the eyes, hands, and feet. As if this were not enough, they next construct an image of Bhairava or Durga holding a three-pronged fork in her hand; this they place so close to the effigy of the person to whom mischief is meant that the fork penetrates its breast.​[223] To injure a person a Singhalese sorcerer will procure a lock of his intended victim’s hair, a paring of his nails, or a thread of his garment. Then he fashions an image of him and thrusts nails made of five metals into the joints. All these he buries where the unfortunate man is likely to pass. No sooner has he done so than the victim falls ill with swelling or stiffness of joints, or burning sensations in the body, or disfigurements of the mouth, legs, and arms.​[224]

Similar enchantments are wrought by the Moslem peoples of North Africa. Thus an Arabic treatise on magic directs that if you wish to deprive a man of the use of his limbs you should make a waxen image of him, and engrave his name and his mother’s name on it with a knife of which the handle must be made of the same wax; then smite the limb of the image which answers to the particular limb of the man which you desire to disable; at the same moment the limb of flesh and blood will be paralysed.​[225] The following is another extract from the same treatise: “To injure the eyes of an enemy, take a taper and fashion it into the likeness of him whom you would harm. Write on it the seven signs, along with the name of your enemy and the name of his mother and gouge out the two eyes of the figure with two points. Then put it in a pot with {p66} quicklime on which you must throw a little chârib el h’amâm, and bury the whole near the fire. The fire will make your victim to shriek and will hurt his eyes so that he will see nothing, and that the pain will cause him to utter cries of distress. But do not prolong the operation more than seven days, for he would die and you would have to answer for it at the day of the last judgment. If you wish to heal him, withdraw the figure and throw it into water. He will recover, with God’s leave.”​[226]

Nowhere, perhaps, were the magic arts more carefully cultivated, nowhere did they enjoy greater esteem or exercise a deeper influence on the national life than in the land of the Pharaohs. Little wonder, therefore, that the practice of enchantment by means of images was familiar to the wizards of Egypt. A drop of a man’s blood, some clippings of his hair or parings of his nails, a rag of the garment which he had worn, sufficed to give a sorcerer complete power over him. These relics of his person the magician kneaded into a lump of wax, which he moulded into the likeness and dressed after the fashion of his intended victim, who was then at the mercy of his tormentor. If the image was exposed to the fire, the person whom it represented straightway fell into a burning fever; if it were stabbed with a knife, he felt the pain of the wound.​[227] Thus, for instance, a certain superintendent of the king’s cattle was once prosecuted in an Egyptian court of law for having made figures of men and women in wax, thereby causing paralysis of their limbs and other grievous bodily harm. He had somehow obtained a book of magic which contained the spells and directions how to act in reciting them. Armed with this powerful instrument the rogue had shut himself up in a secret chamber, and there proceeded to cast spells over the people of his town.​[228] In ancient Babylonia also it was {p67} a common practice to make an image of clay, pitch, honey, fat, or other soft material in the likeness of an enemy, and to injure or kill him by burning, burying, or otherwise ill-treating it. Thus in a hymn to the fire-god Nusku we read:

But both in Babylon and in Egypt this ancient tool of superstition, so baneful in the hands of the mischievous and malignant, was also pressed into the service of religion and turned to glorious account for the confusion and overthrow of demons. In a Babylonian incantation we meet with a long list of evil spirits whose effigies were burnt by the magician in the hope that, as their images melted in the fire, so the fiends themselves might melt away and disappear.​[230] Every night when the sun-god Ra sank down to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the arch-fiend Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure his light and weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in this daily struggle, a ceremony was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon’s name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair, spat upon, hacked with a stone knife, and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then burned it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectually disposed of, waxen effigies of each of his principal demons, and of their fathers, mothers, and children, were {p68} made and burnt in the same way. The service, accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells, was repeated not merely morning, noon, and night, but whenever a storm was raging, or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds were stealing across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disc. The fiends of darkness, clouds, and rain felt the injuries inflicted on their images as if they had been done to themselves; they passed away, at least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once more.​[231]

From the azure sky, the stately fanes, and the solemn ritual of ancient Egypt we have to travel far in space and time to the misty mountains and the humble cottages of the Scottish Highlands of to-day; but at our journey’s end we shall find our ignorant countrymen seeking to attain the same end by the same means and, unhappily, with the same malignity as the Egyptian of old. To kill a person whom he hates, a modern Highlander will still make a rude clay image of him, called a corp chre or corp chreadh (“clay body”), stick it full of pins, nails, and broken bits of glass, and then place it in a running stream with its head to the current. As every pin is thrust into the figure an incantation is uttered, and the person represented feels a pain in the corresponding part of his body. If the intention is to make him die a lingering death, the operator is careful to stick no pins into the region of the heart, whereas he thrusts them into that region deliberately if he desires to rid himself of his enemy at once. And as the clay puppet crumbles away in the running water, so the victim’s body is believed to waste away and turn to clay. In Islay the spell spoken over the corp chre, when it is ready to receive the pins, is as follows: “From behind you are like a ram with an old fleece.” And as the pins are being thrust in, a long incantation is pronounced, beginning “As you waste away, may she waste away; as this wounds you, may it wound her.” Sometimes, we are told, the effigy is set before a blazing fire on a door which has been taken off its hinges; there it is toasted and {p69} turned to make the human victim writhe in agony. The corp chre is reported to have been employed of late years in the counties of Inverness, Ross, and Sutherland. A specimen from Inverness-shire may be seen in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford.​[232] It is remarkable, however, that in the Highlands this form of magic has no power over a man who has lost any of his members. For example, though Ross-shire witches made a clay figure of “Donald of the Ear,” they could not destroy him, because he had lost an ear in battle.​[233] A similar form of witchcraft, known as “burying the sheaf,” seems still to linger in Ireland among the dwellers in the Bog of Ardee. The person who works the charm goes first to a chapel and says certain prayers with his back to the altar; then he takes a sheaf of wheat, which he fastens into the likeness of a human body, sticking pins in the joints of the stems and, according to one account, shaping a heart of plaited straw. This sheaf he buries in the devil’s name near the house of his enemy, who will, it is supposed, gradually pine away as the sheaf decays, dying when it finally decomposes. If the enchanter desires his foe to perish speedily, he buries the sheaf in wet ground, where it will soon moulder away; but if on the other hand his wish is that his victim should linger in pain, he chooses a dry spot, where decomposition will be slow.​[234] However, in Scotland, as in Babylon and Egypt, the destruction of an image has also been employed for the discomfiture of fiends. When Shetland fishermen wish to disenchant their boat, they {p70} row it out to sea before sunrise, and as the day is dawning they burn a waxen figure in the boat, while the skipper exclaims, “Go hence, Satan.”​[235]

If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the Esquimaux of Bering Strait a barren woman desirous of having a son will consult a shaman, who commonly makes, or causes her husband to make, a small doll-like image over which he performs certain secret rites, and the woman is directed to sleep with it under her pillow.​[236] Amongst the many ceremonies which a Thompson Indian girl of British Columbia had formerly to perform at puberty was the following. She had to run four times in the morning, carrying two small stones which had been obtained from underneath the water. These were put in her bosom; and as she ran, they slipped down between her body and her clothes and fell to the ground. While she ran, she prayed to the Dawn that when she should be with child she might be delivered as easily as she had been delivered of these stones.​[237] Similarly among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands a pregnant woman would let round stones, eels, chips, or other small objects slip down over her abdomen for the sake of facilitating her delivery.​[238] Among the Nishinam Indians of California, when a woman is childless, her female friends sometimes make out of grass a rude image of a baby and tie it in a small basket after the Indian fashion. Some day, when the woman is from home, they lay this grass baby in her hut. On finding it she holds it to her breast, pretends {p71} to nurse it, and sings it lullabies. This is done as a charm to make her conceive.​[239] The Huichol Indians of Mexico believe in a certain Mother who is the goddess of conception and childbirth, and lives in a cave near Santa Catarina. A woman desirous of offspring deposits in this cave a doll made of cotton cloth to represent the baby on which her heart is set. After a while she goes back to the cave, puts the doll under her girdle, and soon afterwards is supposed to be pregnant.​[240] With a like intent Indian women in Peru used to wrap up stones like babies and leave them at the foot of a large stone, which they revered for this purpose.​[241] Among the Makatisses, a Caffre tribe of South Africa, a traveller observed a woman carefully tending a doll made out of a gourd, adorned with necklaces of glass beads, and heavily weighted with iron ore. On enquiry he learned that she had been directed by the medicine-man to do this as a means of obtaining a child.​[242] Among the Basutos childless wives make rude effigies of clay, and give them the name of some tutelar deity. They treat these dolls as if they were real children, and beseech the divinity to whom they have dedicated them to grant them the power of conception.​[243] In Anno, a district of West Africa, women may often be seen carrying wooden dolls strapped, like babies, on their backs as a cure for sterility.​[244] In Japan, when a marriage is unfruitful, the old women of the neighbourhood come to the house and go through a pretence of delivering the wife of a child. The infant is represented by a doll.​[245] The Maoris had a household god whose image was in the form of an infant. The image was very carefully made, generally life-size, and adorned with the family jewels. Barren women nursed it and addressed it in the most endearing terms in order to become mothers.​[246]

Among the Battas of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will make a wooden image of a {p72} child and hold it in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish.​[247] In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms as if she would suckle it. Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the woman’s head, saying, “O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and on my lap.” Then he asks the woman, “Has the child come?” and she answers, “Yes, it is sucking already.” After that the man holds the fowl on the husband’s head, and mumbles some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her.​[248] Here the pretence that a child has been born is a purely magical rite designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with and reinforced by religion. In Saibai, one of the islands in Torres Straits, a similar custom of purely magical character is observed, without any religious alloy. Here, when a woman is pregnant, all the other women assemble. The husband’s sister makes an image of a male child and places it before the pregnant woman; afterwards the image is nursed until the birth of the child in order to ensure that the baby shall be a boy. To secure male offspring a woman will also press to her abdomen a fruit resembling the male organ of generation, which she then passes to another woman who has borne none but boys. This, it is clear, is imitative magic in a slightly different form.​[249] In the seventh month of a woman’s {p73} pregnancy common people in Java observe a ceremony which is plainly designed to facilitate the real birth by mimicking it. Husband and wife repair to a well or to the bank of a neighbouring river. The upper part of the woman’s body is bare, but young banana leaves are fastened under her arms, a small opening, or rather fold, being left in the leaves in front. Through this opening or fold in the leaves on his wife’s body the husband lets fall from above a weaver’s shuttle. An old woman receives the shuttle as it falls, takes it up in her arms and dandles it as if it were a baby, saying, “Oh, what a dear little child! Oh, what a beautiful little child!” Then the husband lets an egg slip through the fold, and when it lies on the ground as an emblem of the afterbirth, he takes his sword and cuts through the banana leaf at the place of the fold, obviously as if he were severing the navel-string.​[250] Persons of high rank in Java observe the ceremony after a fashion in which the real meaning of the rite is somewhat obscured. The pregnant woman is clothed in a long robe, which her husband, kneeling before her, severs with a stroke of his sword from bottom to top. Then he throws his sword on the ground and runs away as fast as he can.​[251] According to another account, the woman is wrapt round with white thread; her husband cuts it with his sword, throws away an oblong white gourd, dashes a fowl’s egg to the ground, rolls along a young coco-nut on which the figures of a man and woman have been painted, and so departs in haste.​[252] Among some of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain the same {p74} end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a large stone attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapt round his body represents the child in the womb, and, following the directions shouted to him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born.​[253]

The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption, and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded man who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of primitive law and philosophy, that boy or man is really your son to all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imitation of a real birth; and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practised by the barbarians.​[254] At the present time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the whole property of his adoptive parents.​[255] Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grown-up man or woman, a great many people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front he is {p75} stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm, and tied to the woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against a real child.​[256] In Central Africa “the Bahima practise adoption; the male relatives always take charge of a brother’s children. When a man dies his brother takes any children of the deceased and places them one by one in his wife’s lap. Then he binds round her waist the thong used for tying the legs of restive cows during milking, just as is done after childbirth. The children are then brought up with his own family.”​[257] In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman’s lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk.​[258] In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.​[259]