./x 
 
TOM TIT TOT 
 
' What diversitie soever there be in herbs, all are shuffled up 
 together under the name of a sallade. Even so, upon the con- 
 sideration of names, I will here huddle up a gallymafry of diverse 
 articles.' 
 
 Of Names. MONTAIGNE, tr. FLORIO. 
 
TOM TIT TOT 
 
 AN ESSAY ON 
 SAVAGE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IN FOLK-TALE 
 
 BY 
 EDWARD CLODD 
 
 Sometime President of the Folk-Lore Society 
 
 Author of ' The Childhood of the World ' 
 
 4 The Story of Creation,' 'Pioneers 
 
 of Evolution,' etc. etc. 
 
 LONDON 
 DUCKWORTH AND CO. 
 
 3 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 
 1898 
 

 Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty 
 
TO MY 
 
 DITH 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE sentence from Montaigne, which faces the 
 title-page of this little book, indicates its scope 
 and purpose. 
 
 It is based upon studies in the philosophy 
 of folk-tales, in the course of which a large 
 number of examples of curious beliefs and 
 customs bearing on the main incident in cer- 
 tain groups have been collected. Some of these 
 are now 'shuffled up together 1 round an old 
 Suffolk tale, whose vivacity and humour secure 
 it the first place among the ' Rumpelstiltskin ' 
 variants with which it is classed. 
 
 Those who have had experience in the gather- 
 ing of materials illustrative of the several 
 departments of barbaric culture will appreciate 
 the difficulty which has been felt in making 
 selections that suffice to interpret the central 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 idea without obscuring it by a multiplicity 
 of examples. If the book, which is designed 
 mainly for popular reading, therefore makes no 
 pretence to exhaustiveness, it may perhaps have 
 the virtue of being less tedious. 
 
 E. C. 
 
 Rosemont, 19 Carleton Road, 
 
 Tufnell Park, N., April 1898. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PA(JE 
 
 INTRODUCTION, .... . . 1 
 
 1. THE STORY OF TOM TIT TOT, .... 8 
 
 2. VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT SCOTCH, TYHOLKSK, 
 
 BASQUE, INDIAN, WELSH, . . . . 17 
 
 3. ON THE DIFFUSION OF STORIES, ... 27 
 
 4. INCIDENTAL FEATURES OF THE STORIES, . . 32 
 
 (a) Superstitions about Iron, ... 33 
 
 (>) Woman as Spinster and Farmer, . . 36 
 
 (c) The Gullible Devil, .... 47 
 
 5. BARBARIC IDEAS ABOUT NAMES, ... 53 
 
 6. MAGIC THROUGH TANGIBLE THINGS HAIR AND 
 
 NAILS, REFUSE, SALIVA, PORTRAIT, . . 57 
 
 7. MAGIC THROUGH INTANGIBLE THINGS SHADOW, 
 
 REFLECTION, NAME, ... 79 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 8. TABOO, ... 114 
 (a) Taboo between Relatives, . 115 
 
 Euphemisms and Name Changes, . . 125 
 
 (6) Taboo on Names of Kings and Priests, . 147 
 
 (c) Taboo on Names of the Dead, . . 164 
 
 (d) Taboo on Names of Gods, . 173 
 
 9. WORDS OF POWER, . ... 192 
 (a) Creative Words, . . .194 
 (6) Mantrams, . . 198 
 (c) Passwords, ... .205 
 (d} Spells and Amulets, . .208 
 
 (e) Cure Charms, 210 
 
 10. THE NAME AND THE SOUL, . .233 
 
 APPENDIX BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE TOM TIT TOT 
 
 GROUP OF FOLK-TALES, . . ~ :' 
 
 INDEX, -'43 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IN commenting on the prominent example of the 
 conversion of the old epics into allegories which 
 is supplied by Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 
 whereby the legends 'lose their dream reality 
 without gaining the reality of ordinary life,' Mr. 
 Leslie Stephen remarks that 'as soon as the 
 genuine inhabitants of Fairyland can be inter- 
 preted as three virtues or three graces, they 
 cease to fascinate' him. With that confession 
 most people will agree. For alike to those who 
 told the story, and to their hearers, these 'in- 
 habitants of Fairyland' were no buckram-clad 
 personifications of Moralities like the characters 
 in the Mystery Plays of four centuries ago. 
 They were real dwellers in a real Wonderland, 
 whose limits are only those of the broad, deep 
 earth, and of the heavens above it. And to 
 
.2 INTRODUCTION 
 
 convert them into vehicles of edification is not 
 merely to empty them of their primitive signi- 
 ficance, but to make vain the attempt to under- 
 stand the conditions which gave birth and long 
 renown to saga and fireside tale. In the dim 
 past when these were woven out of old traditions, 
 no sharp lines severed nature from super-nature; 
 troll and fairy were part of the vagaries which 
 seemed to make up the sum of things at whose 
 core it entered not the mind of man to conceive 
 that unbroken order might be found. Their old 
 mythologies, full of crude and coarse detail, were 
 no fables to the ancient Greeks slowly rising 
 above the barbaric level of ancestors on a 
 plane with the Gold Coast savage who believes 
 his medicine-man when, handing on the tradi- 
 tional cosmogony of the tribe, he tells how the 
 world was made by a big spider. The healthy- 
 natured child, who in many things represents the 
 savage stage of thinking, listens without question 
 to the stories of the Giant who hid his heart in 
 a duck's egg on an island out of harm's way, a.; 
 he vainly hoped ; and of Beauty and the Beast, 
 where the princess's curiosity led to the retrans- 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 formation of the enchanted prince to the shape 
 of loathly monster. 
 
 To the secular arm, therefore, be delivered 
 any and every book which, catering for the 
 youngsters, throttles the life of the old folk- 
 tales with coils of explanatory notes, and heaps 
 on their maimed corpses the dead weight of 
 bibliographical appendices. Nevertheless, that 
 which delighted our childhood may instruct our 
 manhood ; and notes, appendices, and all the 
 gear of didactic exposition, have their place 
 elsewhere in helping the student, anxious to 
 reach the seed of fact which is covered by the 
 pulp of fiction. For, to effect this is to make 
 approach to man's thoughts and conceptions of 
 himself and his surroundings, to his way of 
 looking at things, and to explanation of his 
 conduct both in work and play. Hence the 
 folk-tale and the game are alike pressed into the 
 service of study of the human mind. Turn where 
 we may, the pastimes of children are seen to mimic 
 the serious pursuits of men. Their dances and 
 romps, their tin soldiers, guns, and trumpets, the 
 dolls and other apparatus of the nursery, and the 
 
4 INTRODUCTION 
 
 strategic combats of the playground, have a high 
 antiquity. The game of ' Buck, buck, how many 
 fingers do I hold up ? ' was played in the streets 
 of Imperial Rome. The ancient Greek ' ostra- 
 kinda,"* or ' game of the shell, 1 has its counterpart 
 in one played among the Navajoes of New 
 Mexico. ' Hot cockles ' is depicted on Egyptian 
 wall-paintings, and a wooden toy-bird with wheels 
 under its wings, found in the Fay urn cemetery, is 
 identical with specimens in use among Yakut and 
 Aino children. The players of ' All Round the 
 Mulberry Tree ' probably represent a dance of 
 old round a sacred bush ; ' Green Gravel ' and 
 4 Jenny Jones ' are funeral games ; ' Forfeits ' are 
 relics of divination ; and ' Cat's Cradle ' belongs 
 to the string puzzles which are played all the 
 world over by savage and civilised. 
 
 Whether game and story embody serious ele- 
 ments, or are the outcome of lighter moods, 
 it is this trivial or earnest purpose that we 
 strive to reach. And, notably in the analysis 
 of tales, that effort has been well justified in 
 bringing us, often when least suspected, near 
 some deposit of early thought, near some guesses 
 

 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 at a philosophy which embraces all life in a 
 common origin and destiny; and in putting us 
 into touch with instinctive feelings of the un- 
 cultured mind whose validity has been proved 
 by reason and experience. 
 
 A superficial acquaintance with folk-tales re- 
 veals the fact that many of them are capable 
 of division into a series of well-marked groups 
 united by a common motif, round which imagi- 
 nation has played, 'truth' being thus 'embodied 
 in a tale.' And the interest in this cardinal fea- 
 ture is the greater if it can be shown to contain 
 some primitive philosophy of things which has 
 expressed itself in beliefs that have ruled man's 
 conduct, and in rites and ceremonies which are 
 the ' outward and visible signs ' of the beliefs. 
 Several groups answer to this requirement. One 
 of them centres round the tale, referred to above, 
 of ' the Giant who had no Heart in his Body,' 
 variants of which have been found from India 
 to the Highlands, and from the Arctic seaboard 
 to Africa. The fundamental idea in this group 
 is the widespread barbaric belief in the separate- 
 ness of the soul or heart or strength, or whatever 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 
 
 else is denominated the seat of life, from the 
 body, whose fate is nevertheless bound up with 
 that of the soul. In the Norse example, a 
 princess wooed by a giant wheedles him, in 
 Delilah - like fashion, into making known in 
 what secret place his heart is hidden. He 
 tells her that it is in an egg in a duck swimming 
 in a well in a church on an island, all which she 
 straightway repeats to her true love who has 
 stolen into the castle to rescue her. With the 
 aid of a number of helpful animals, a common 
 feature of folk-tales, the lover gets the egg, and 
 as he squeezes it the giant bursts to pieces. 
 Fantastic as all this seems, it is only the accre- 
 tion of varying detail round a serious belief of 
 which living examples are found throughout the 
 world. Obviously that belief lies at the base of 
 the argument by which Herbert Spencer, Tylor, 
 and others of their school show how theories of 
 the soul and future life were elaborated from 
 barbaric conceptions of the ( other self" which 
 quitted the body for a time in sleep and dreams 
 and swoons, leaving it at death to return no 
 more, although fitfully visiting its old haunts to 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 help or harm the living. But more than bare 
 hint on these matters lies beyond the purpose of 
 this reference, which is designed to make easier 
 the passage to the significance of the central idea 
 of another group of folk-tales, the masterpiece 
 among which gives its title to this volume. 
 
TOM TIT TOT 
 
 THE writer's interest in that group was 
 awakened some years ago when looking over 
 a bundle of old numbers of the Ipswich Journal, 
 in which some odds and ends of local ' notes and 
 queries'* were collected. Among these was the 
 story of ' Tom Tit Tot, 1 which, with another 
 story, ' Cap o 1 Rushes "* (in this the King Lear 
 incident of testing the love of the three daughters 
 is the motif) had been sent to Mr. Hindes 
 Groome, the editor of the ' notes and queries ' 
 column, by a lady to whom they had been told 
 in her girlhood by an old West Suffolk nurse. 
 Much of their value lies in their being almost 
 certainly derived from oral transmission through 
 uncultured peasants. The story of 'Tom Tit 
 
TOMTITTOT 9 
 
 Tot," given in the racy dialect of East Anglia, 
 is as follows : 
 
 Well, once upon a time there were a woman and 
 she baked five pies. And when they come out of 
 the oven, they was that overbaked, the crust were 
 too hard to eat. So she says to her darter 
 
 1 Maw'r/ J says she, ' put you them there pies on 
 the shelf an' leave 'em there a little, an' they'll 
 come agin' she meant, you know, the crust 'ud 
 get soft. 
 
 But the gal, she says to herself, ' Well, if they'll 
 come agin, I'll ate 'em now.' And she set to work 
 and ate 'em all, first and last. 
 
 ] The local pronunciation of ' mawther, ' which, remarks Nail 
 in his Glossary of the Dialect and Provincialisms of East Anglia 
 (Longmans, 1866), ' is the most curious word in the East Anglian 
 vocabulary.' A woman and her mawther mean a woman and 
 her daughter. The word is derived from the same root as 
 ' maid ' and cognate words, upon which see Skeat's Etymological 
 Dictionary, s.v. 
 
 Nail gives examples of the use of mawther by Tusser and other 
 writers. Tusser (English Dialect Soc., editn. 1878, p. 37) speaks 
 of 'a sling for a moether, a bowe for a boy.' In Ben Jonson's 
 Alchymist, Restive says to Dame Pliant (Act iv. 7) 'Away, you 
 talk like a foolish mawther \ ' In the English Moor (Act iii. 1), 
 Richard Brome makes a playful use of the word 
 
 ' P. I am a mother that do want a service. 
 Qu. O, thou'rt a Norfolk woman (cry thee mercy), 
 Where maids are mothers and mothers are maids.' 
 
 And in Blomfield's Suffolk Ballad we read 
 
 ' When once a giggling maivther you, 
 And I a red-faced chubby boy.' 
 
 In the Gothic translation of the Gospels, Luke viii. 54, ' Maid, 
 arise,' is rendered 'Maur, urreis.' 
 
10 TOM TIT TOT 
 
 Well, come supper time the woman she said, 
 ' Goo you and git one o' them there pies. I dare 
 say they've came agin now/ 
 
 The gal she went an' she looked, and there warn't 
 nothin' but the dishes. So back she come and says 
 she, ' Noo, they ain't come agin.' 
 
 ' Not none on 'em ? ' says the mother. 
 
 ' Not none on 'em,' says she. 
 
 ' Well, come agin, or not come agin,' says the 
 woman, ' I '11 ha' one for supper.' 
 
 ( But you can't, if they ain't come,' says the gal. 
 
 ' But I can/ says she. ' Goo you and bring the 
 best of 'em.' 
 
 ' Best or worst,' says the gal, ' I 've ate 'em all, and 
 you can't ha' one till that 's come agin.' 
 
 Well, the woman she were wholly bate, and she 
 took her spinnin' to the door to spin, and as she 
 span she sang 
 
 1 My darter ha' ate five, five pies to-day 
 My darter ha' ate five, five pies to-day.' 
 
 The king he were a comin' down the street an 
 
 he hard her sing, but what she sang he couldn't 
 
 hare, so he stopped and said 
 
 ' What were that you was a singun of, maw'r ? ' 
 The woman, she were ashamed to let him hare 
 
 what her darter had been a doin', so she sang, 'stids 
 
 o' that 
 
 ( My darter ha' spun five, five skeins to-day 
 My darter ha' spun five, five skeins to-dny. ' 
 
 ' S'ars o' mine ! ' said the king, ' I never heerd tell 
 of any one as could do that.' 
 
TOM TIT TOT 11 
 
 Then he said : ( Look you here, I want a wife, 
 and I '11 marry your darter. But look you here/ 
 says he, ' 'leven months out o' the year she shall 
 have all the vittles she likes to eat, and all the 
 gownds she likes to git, and all the cumpny she 
 likes to hev ; but the last month o' the year she '11 
 ha' to spin five skeins iv'ry day, an' if she doon't, I 
 shall kill her.' 
 
 ' All right,' says the woman : for she thowt what 
 a grand marriage that was. And as for them five 
 skeins, when te come tew, there 'd be plenty o' ways 
 of gettin' out of it, and likeliest, he 'd ha' forgot 
 about it. 
 
 Well, so they was married. An' for 'leven 
 months the gal had all the vittles she liked to ate, 
 and all the gownds she liked to git, an' all the 
 cumpny she liked to hev. 
 
 But when the time was gettin' oover, she began 
 to think about them there skeins an' to wonder if 
 he had 'em in mind. But not one word did he say 
 about 'em, an' she whoolly thowt he 'd forgot 'em. 
 
 Howsivir, the last day o' the last month, he takes 
 her to a room she 'd niver set eyes on afore. There 
 worn't nothiii' in it but a spinnin' wheel and a stool. 
 An' says he, ' Now, me dear, hare yow '11 be shut in 
 to-morrow with some vittles and some flax, and if 
 you hain't spun five skeins by the night, yar hid '11 
 goo off'.' 
 
 An' awa' he went about his business. 
 
 Well, she were that frightened. She 'd allus been 
 such a gatless mawther, that she didn't se much as 
 know how to spin, an' what were she to dew to- 
 
12 TOM TIT TOT 
 
 morrer, with no one to come nigh her to help her. 
 She sat down on a stool in the kitchen, and lork ! 
 how she did cry ! 
 
 Howsivir, all on a sudden she hard a sort of a 
 knockin' low down on the door. She upped and 
 oped it, an' what should she see but a small little 
 black thing with a long tail. That looked up at her 
 right kewrious, an' that said 
 
 ' What are yew a cryin' for ? ' 
 
 ' Wha 's that to yew ? ' says she. 
 
 ' Niver yew mind/ that said, * but tell me what 
 you 're a cryin' for.' 
 
 1 That oon't dew me noo good if I dew/ says she. 
 
 f Yew doon't know that/ that said, an' twirled 
 that's tail round. 
 
 'Well/ says she, 'that oon't dew no harm, if that 
 doon't dew no good/ and she upped and told about 
 the pies an' the skeins an' everything. 
 
 ' This is what I '11 dew/ says the little black thing: 
 'I'll come to yar winder iv'ry mornin' an' take the 
 flax an' bring it spun at night.' 
 
 ' What 's your pay ? ' says she. 
 
 That looked out o' the corners o' that's eyes an' 
 that said : ' 1 '11 give you three guesses every night 
 to guess my name, an' if you hain't guessed it afore 
 the month 's up, yew shall be mine.' 
 
 Well, she thowt she'd be sure to guess that's 
 name afore the month was up. ' All right/ says she, 
 ' I agree.' 
 
 ' All right/ that says, an' lork ! how that twirled 
 that's tail. 
 
 Well, the next day, har husband he took her 
 
TOM TIT TOT 13 
 
 inter the room, an' there was the flax an' the day's 
 vittles, 
 
 ' Now, there 's the flax/ says he, ' an' if that ain't 
 spun up this night off goo yar hid.' An' then he 
 went out an' locked the door. 
 
 He'd hardly goon, when there was a knockin' 
 agin the winder. 
 
 She upped and she oped it, and there sure enough 
 was the little oo'd thing a settin' on the ledge. 
 
 < Where's the flax ? ' says he. 
 
 ' Here te be,' says she. And she gonned it to him. 
 
 Well, come the evenin', a knockin' come agin to 
 the winder. She upped an' she oped it, and there 
 were the little oo'd thing, with five skeins of flax 
 on his arm. 
 
 ( Here te be,' says he, an' he gonned it to her. 
 
 ' Now, what 's my name ? ' says he. 
 
 ' What, is that Bill ? ' says she. 
 
 f Noo, that ain't/ says he. An' he twirled his tail. 
 
 ' Is that Ned ? ' says she. 
 
 ' Noo, that ain't/ says he. An' he twirled his tail. 
 
 e Well, is that Mark ? ' says she. 
 
 'Noo, that ain't/ says he. An' he twirled his 
 tail harder, an' awa' he flew. 
 
 Well, when har husban' he come in : there was 
 the five skeins riddy for him. ' I see I shorn't hev 
 for to kill you to-night, me dare/ says he. ' Yew '11 
 hev yar vittles and yar flax in the mornin'/ says he, 
 an' away he goes. 
 
 Well, ivery day the flax an' the vittles, they was 
 browt, an' ivery day that there little black impet 
 used for to come mornin' s and evenin's. An' all 
 
14 TOM TIT TOT 
 
 the day the mawther she set a try in' fur to think of 
 names to say to it when te come at night. But she 
 niver hot on the right one. An' as that got to-warts 
 the ind o' the month, the impet that began for to 
 look soo maliceful, an' that twirled that's tail faster 
 an' faster each time she gave a guess. 
 
 At last te come to the last day but one. The 
 impet that come at night along o' the five skeins, 
 an' that said 
 
 ' What, hain't yew got my name yet ? ' 
 
 ' Is that Nicodemus ? ' says she. 
 
 ' Noo, t'ain't,' that says. 
 
 1 Is that Sarnmle ? ' says she. 
 
 ' Noo, t'ain't,' that says. 
 
 1 A-well, is that Methusalem ?' says she. 
 
 ' Noo, t'ain't that norther,' he says. 
 
 Then that looks at her with that's eyes like a 
 cool o' fire, an' that says, ' Woman, there 's only 
 to-morrer night, an' then yar'll be mine!' An' 
 away te flew. 
 
 Well, she felt that horrud. Howsomediver, she 
 hard the king a coming along the passage. In he 
 came, an' when he see the five skeins, he says, 
 says he 
 
 ' Well, me dare,' says he, e I don't see but what 
 yew '11 ha' your skeins ready to-morrer night as 
 well, an' as I reckon I shorn' t ha' to kill you, I "11 
 ha' supper in here to-night.' So they brought 
 supper, an' another stool for him, and down the 
 tew they sat. 
 
 Well, he hadn't eat but a mouthful or so, when 
 he stops and begins to laugh. 
 
TOM TIT TOT 15 
 
 * What is it ? ' says she. 
 
 'A-why/ says he, 'I was out a-huntin' to-day, 
 an' I got away to a place in the wood I 'd never 
 seen afore. An' there was an old chalk pit. An' 
 I heerd a sort of a hummin', kind o'. So I got off 
 my hobby, an' I went right quiet to the pit, an' I 
 looked down. Well, what should there be but the 
 funniest little black thing yew iver set eyes on. 
 An' what was that a dewin' on, but that had a little 
 spinnin' wheel, an' that were a spinnin' wonnerful 
 fast, an' a twirlin' that's tail. An' as that span, 
 that sang 
 
 f Nimmy nimmy not, 
 My name 's Tom Tit Tot. ' 
 
 Well, when the mawther heerd this, she fared as 
 if she could ha' jumped outer her skin for joy, but 
 she di'n't say a word. 
 
 Next day, that there little thing looked soo 
 maliceful when he come for the flax. An' when 
 night came, she heerd that a knockin' agin the 
 winder panes. She oped the winder, an' that 
 come right in on the ledge. That were grinnin' 
 from are to are, an' Oo ! tha's tail were twirlin' 
 round so fast. 
 
 ' What's my name?' that says, as that gonned 
 her the skeins. 
 
 ' Is that Solomon ? ' she says, pretendin' to be 
 afeard. 
 
 'Noo, t'ain't,' that says, an' that come fudder 
 inter the room. 
 
 ' Well, is that Zebedee ? ' says she agin. 
 
16 TOM TIT TOT 
 
 'Noo, t'ain't/ says the impet. An' then that 
 laughed an' twirled that's tail till yew cou'n't 
 hardly see it. 
 
 ' Take time, woman/ that says ; ' next guess, an' 
 you're mine.' An' that stretched out that's black 
 hands at her. 
 
 Well, she backed a step or two, an' she looked 
 at it, and then she laughed out, an' says she, a 
 pointin' of her finger at it 
 
 ' Nimmy nimmy not, 
 Yar name 's Tom Tit Tot. ' 
 
 Well, when that hard her, that shruck awful an' 
 awa' that flew into the dark, an' she niver saw it 
 noo more. 
 
II 
 
 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 THERE would be only profitless monotony in 
 printing the full texts, or even in giving abstracts, 
 of the numerous variants of this story which 
 have been collected. A list of these, with such 
 comment as may perchance be useful to a special 
 class of readers, is supplied in the Appendix. 1 
 Here it suffices to remark that in all of them 
 the plot centres round the discovery of the name 
 of the maleficent actor in the little drama, 
 and to give a summary of a few of the most 
 widely spread stories in which, as might be 
 expected, a certain variety of incident occurs. 
 These are chosen from Scotland, Tyrol, the 
 Basque provinces, and the Far East, the 
 variants from this last containing the funda- 
 1 P. 239. 
 
 B 
 
18 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 mental idea in an entirely different plot. 
 To these follow a Welsh variant in which our 
 joy at the defeat of the demon or witch in 
 most of the stories is changed into sorrow for 
 the fairy. 
 
 The Scotch ' Whuppity Stoorie ' tells of a man 
 who ' gaed to a fair ae day, 1 and was never more 
 heard of. His widow was left with a 'sookin' 
 lad bairn, 1 and a sow that ' was soon to farra.' 
 Going to the sty one day, she saw, to her distress, 
 the sow ready ' to gi'e up the ghost,' and as she 
 sat down with her bairn and 'grat sairer than 
 ever she did for the loss o' her ain good man,' 
 there came an old woman dressed in green, who 
 asked what she would give her for curing the 
 sow. Then they 'watted thooms' on the bar- 
 gain, by which the woman promised to give the 
 green fairy anything she liked, and the sow was 
 thereupon made well. To the mother's dismay 
 the fairy then said that she would have the bairn. 
 c But,' said she, ' this I '11 let ye to wut, I canna 
 by the law we leeve on take your bairn till the 
 third day after this day ; and no' then, if ye can 
 tell me my right name.' For two days the poor 
 
VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 19 
 
 woman wandered, ' cuddlin' her bairn, 1 when, as 
 she came near an old quarry-hole, she heard the 
 'burring of a lint- wheel, and a voice lilting a 
 song,' and then saw the green fairy at her wheel, 
 4 si 'iging like ony precentor ' 
 
 ' Little kens our guid dame at hame 
 That Whuppity Stoorie is my name/ 
 
 Speeding home glad-hearted, she awaited the 
 fairy's coming; and, being a 'jokus woman,' 
 pulled a long face, begging that the bairn might 
 be spared and the sow taken, and when this was 
 spurned, offering herself. ' The deil 's in the daft 
 jad,' quo' the fairy, ' wha in a' the earthly warld 
 wad ever meddle wi' the likes o' thee?' Then 
 the woman threw off her mask of grief, and, 
 making ' a curchie down to the ground,' quo' she, 
 4 1 might hae had the wit to ken that the likes 
 o' me is na fit to tie the warst shoe-strings o' the 
 heich and mighty princess, Whuppity Stoorie.' 
 ' Gin a fluff o' gunpouder had come out o' the 
 grund, it couldna hae gart the fairy loup heicher 
 nor she did; syne doun she came again, dump 
 on her shoeheels, and, whurlin' round, she ran 
 
20 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 down the brae, scraichin 1 for rage, like a houlet 
 chased wi 1 the witches/ l 
 
 In the Tyrolese story, a count, while hunting 
 in a forest, is suddenly confronted by a dwarf 
 with fiery red eyes and a beard down to his 
 knees, who rolls his eyes in fury, and tells the 
 count that he must pay for trespassing on the 
 mannikin's territory either with his life or the 
 surrender of his wife. The count pleads for 
 pardon, and the dwarf so far modifies his terms 
 as to agree that if within a month the countess 
 cannot find out his name, she is to be his. Then, 
 escorting the count to the forest bounds where 
 stood an ancient fir-tree, it is bargained that the 
 dwarf will there await the countess, who shall 
 have three guesses three times, nine in all. The 
 month expires, and she then repairs to the 
 rendezvous to make her first round of guesses, 
 giving the names, ' Janne,^ c Fichte," and ' Fohre.' 
 The dwarf shrieks with merriment over her 
 failure, and when she returns to the castle she 
 enters the chapel and offers earnest prayers for 
 help in guessing the right name. But the next 
 
 1 Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotlaiid, pp. 72-75. 
 
VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 21 
 
 day, when she gives the names < Hafer,' ' Pleuten,"* 
 and ' Turken, 1 repeats the failure, and calls forth 
 the dwarf's unholy glee. When she comes to 
 the tree on the third day, he is not there. So 
 she wandered from the spot till she reached a 
 lovely valley, and, seeing a tiny house, went on 
 tiptoe, and peeping in at the window heard the 
 dwarf singing his name in a verse as he hopped 
 gaily on the hearth. The countess hurries back 
 to the tree in high spirits, and when the dwarf 
 appears she artfully withholds the secret she has 
 learned till the last chance is hers. 'Pur, 1 she 
 guesses, and the dwarf chortles; 'Ziege,' then 
 he bounds in the air ; ' Purzinigele, 1 she shouts 
 derisively, and then the dwarf, rolling his red 
 eyes in rage, doubles his fist, and disappears for 
 ever in the darkness. 1 
 
 In Basque folk- tale, a mother is beating her 
 lazy girl, when the lord of a castle hard by, who 
 is passing at the time, asks what all the pother 
 is about, and is told that the girl's beauty makes 
 her saucy and indolent. Then follow the usual 
 
 1 Tirolo Kinder- und Hausmiirchen, pp. 225-232. Innsbruck, 
 1852. 
 
22 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 incidents, with the exception that a witch, in- 
 stead of a demon, comes to aid the girl, to whom 
 the lord then offers marriage if she can get a 
 certain amount of work done within a given time, 
 the witch's bargain being that the girl must re- 
 member her name, Marie Kirikitoun, a year and 
 a day hence. The wedding takes place, and as 
 the year end draws near, sadness falls on the 
 bride, despite the holding of grand festivals to 
 gladden her spirits. For she had forgotten 
 the witch's name. At one of the feastings an 
 old woman knocks at the door, and when a 
 servant tells her that all the high jinks are kept 
 up to make her mistress cheerful, the beldame 
 says that if the lady had seen what she had seen, 
 her laughter would run free enough. So the 
 servant bids her come in, and then she tells how 
 she had seen an old witch leaping and bounding 
 from one ditch to another, and singing all the 
 time, ' Houpa, houpa, Marie Kirikitoun, nobody 
 will remember my name.'* Whereupon the bride 
 became merry-hearted, rewarded the old woman, 
 and told the enraged witch her name when she 
 came for fulfilment of the bargain. 
 
VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 23 
 
 In Sagas from the Far East, a king sends his 
 son on travel that he may gain all kinds of 
 knowledge. The prince takes, as his favourite 
 companion, the son of the prime minister, who, 
 on tiieir return journey, burning with envy at the 
 superior wisdom of his royal comrade, entices him 
 into a forest and kills him. As the prince dies, 
 he utters the word, < Abaraschika.' When the 
 murderer reaches the palace, he tells the sorrow- 
 ing king how the prince fell sick unto death, 
 and that he had time to speak only the above 
 wo*d. Thereupon the king summoned his seers 
 anc magicians, and threatened them with death 
 if they did not, within seven days, interpret the 
 meming of ' Abaraschika." 1 That time had well- 
 nigi expired when a student came beckoning to 
 then, bidding them not despair, for, while sleep- 
 ing beneath a tree, he had heard a bird telling 
 his young ones not to cry for food, since the 
 Khan would slay a thousand men on the morrow 
 because they could not find out the meaning of 
 ( Abaraschika." And the meaning, said the bird, 
 vas this : c My bosom friend hath enticed me 
 nto a thick grove, and hath taken away my life. 1 
 
24 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 So the seers and magicians hastened to report 
 what they had heard to the king, who thereupon 
 put the murderer to death. 1 
 
 The Welsh story (one of several closely allied 
 in detail) tells that once upon a time the youth- 
 ful heir of Ystrad, on adventure bent, wandered 
 by the banks of the Gwyrfai stream that issues 
 from Quellyn's lake. As night fell he hid him- 
 self by a bush near the spot where the ' Tylwyth 
 Teg, 1 or 'Fair Family' (the 'Folk of the Red 
 Coat '), held their revels. The moon shone in a 
 cloudless sky, and the youth had not long to 
 wait before he saw the 'little people 1 trcop 
 forth to the dance. Among these was one ^lio 
 straightway kindled his love, for never m:>re 
 graceful maiden or light-footed dancer had he 
 seen. The longer he watched her, the hotter 
 grew his desire, till, making resolve to seize her, 
 he 'sprang like a lion into the middle of the 
 circle 'just when the fairies were most enjoy rig 
 the swing of the dance, and carried her off in Ms 
 arms to Ystrad. ' Her companions vanished like 
 a breath in July as they heard the shrill voice of 
 1 Sagas from the Far East, translated by R. H. Busk. p. 1."'7. 
 
VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 25 
 
 their sister crying for help.' When the youth 
 reached home he strove by every gentle art in his 
 power to make the fairy happy, and she served 
 him well in return, being obdurate only in one 
 thing. 'He could in nowise prevail on her to 
 tell him her name,' and vain were all his efforts 
 to discover it, till one evening, as he was driving 
 two of his cows to the meadow, he came again to 
 the spot where he had captured the fairy. He 
 hid himself, as before, in the thicket, and when 
 the troop of the Red-coated appeared, he heard 
 them saying to one another that when they last 
 came thither a mortal had carried off their sister 
 Penelope. 1 Glad-hearted, the youth hurried home 
 and called the fairy by her name, whereupon 
 grief clouded her face. Her beauty and distress 
 moved him the more to urge that she who had 
 been his faithful serving-maid would become his 
 wife ; and although she long refused him, she at 
 last consented, but only on his promising that if 
 ever he struck her with iron she should be free 
 to leave him. For years he kept his word, 
 
 1 ' I cannot satisfactorily account for the introduction of this 
 name into the story.' Letter from Professor Rhys to the 
 author. 
 
26 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 but, one day, as they went together to catch 
 a wild horse in the field, he threw the bridle 
 at him, and by mischance struck his fairy wife 
 with the iron bit, whereupon she straightway 
 vanished. 1 
 
 1 Cymmodor, iv. 189. 
 
Ill 
 
 ON THE DIFFUSION OF STORIES 
 
 HERE we may interpose a brief example from 
 the Welsh group, as bearing on the origin of the 
 alliterative name < Tom Tit Tot/ 
 
 A farmer's wife at Llaniestin often lent her 
 gradell and padell (the flat iron on which the 
 dough is put for baking, and the pan which is 
 put over it) to a fairy, who, on returning the 
 articles, always brought a loaf of bread in 
 acknowledgment. One day she begged the loan 
 of a troell-bach, or spinning-wheel, whereupon 
 the woman asked her name, which the fairy 
 refused to tell. So she was tracked and watched 
 at her spinning, when she was heard singing to 
 the whirr of the wheel : 
 
 ( Little does she know 
 That Trwtyn-Tratyn 
 Is my name.' 
 
 27 
 
28 ON THE DIFFUSION 
 
 In an Irish variant, to which reference occurs 
 in Taylor's translation of Grimm's Rumpel- 
 stiltslcin, the fairy sings 
 
 ' Little does my lady wot 
 That my name is Trit a Trot.' 1 
 
 As c Trwtyn-Tratyn ' is not Welsh, there remains 
 for the curious the search after the original source 
 and mode of transmission of the Suffolk tale. 
 That question is obviously bound up with the 
 general subject of the origin and migration of 
 stories, a question to which no answer is likely to 
 be forthcoming in the absence of documents. In 
 some quarters high hopes were indulged that 
 the ingathering of the variants of one group 
 of stories, and the framing of charts of its 
 geographical distribution, would enable us to 
 trace the parent type to its original home. 
 c Cinderella ' was chosen, and by the application 
 of great labour, illumined by scholarship, Miss 
 RoalfeCox prepared three hundred and forty-five 
 abstracts of as many versions of that familiar 
 tale, adding tables of areas in which they are 
 found. The result of all the toil and talent 
 
 1 See Note to Gonzenbach's Sicilianischc Miirchen, p. 81. 
 
OF STORIES 29 
 
 thus employed was to leave the question exactly 
 where we found it. In Mr. Andrew Lang's 
 words : ' There is not a sign of her birth-country 
 on Cinderella; not a mark to show that she 
 came from India, or Babylonia, or Egypt, or any 
 other old cradle of civilisation. 1 
 
 That a large number of stories have originated 
 in definite centres, and have been carried from 
 place to place, ' goes without saying." Racial 
 intercourse was already active in the later 
 Neolithic age, and East gave to West of its 
 intellectual, as well as of its material, products. 
 ' Folk-tales might well be scattered abroad in the 
 same manner by merchantmen gossiping over 
 their Khan fires, by Sidonian mariners chatting 
 in the sounding loggia of an Homeric house, by 
 the slave dragged from his home and passed 
 from owner to owner across Africa or Europe, 
 by the wife who, according to primitive law, 
 had to be chosen from an alien clan.' 1 There is 
 weight, also, in Mr. Hindes Groome's arguments 
 on behalf of those ubiquitous nomads, the gypsies, 
 
 1 Introduction by Andrew Lang to Mrs. Margaret Hunt's 
 translation of Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmarchen, p. xiv. 
 
30 ON THE DIFFUSION 
 
 who, especially in past times, had every facility 
 for diffusing their stories among all conditions of 
 men. 1 On the other hand, the fundamental idea 
 at the core of certain stories is explained by the 
 fact that at corresponding levels of culture the 
 human mind accounts for the same things in 
 much the same way. Ideas are universal ; inci- 
 dents are local. For example, the conceptions 
 of a united heaven and earth forced asunder 
 by some defiant hero so that light may be given 
 to the children of men, and of a sky-piercing 
 tree whereby heaven can be reached, have given 
 rise to myths and folk-tales ' from China to 
 Peru/ 
 
 All that we can say by way of approach to the 
 solution of a question whose settlement would 
 throw light on intercourse between peoples, is 
 that where coincidences in stories extend to 
 minute detail, a common origin may be assumed, 
 but that where only a like idea is present as the 
 chief motif, without correspondences in incidental 
 details, independent origin is probable. Strabo 
 
 1 National Review, July 1888. ' Gypsy Folk-Tales : a Missing 
 Link.' 
 
OF STORIES 31 
 
 says that ' in the childhood of the world men, 
 like children, had to be taught by tales'; l and, 
 certainly, their invention is the monopoly of no 
 one race. 
 
 1 I. 2, 8. 
 
IV 
 
 INCIDENTAL FEATURES OF THE 
 STORIES 
 
 ALTHOUGH the selection of only a few of the 
 numerous variants of ' Tom Tit Tot ' relieves us 
 from comment on sundry differences in detail 
 between the whole of them, there are points of 
 interest which call for notice before we advance to 
 the central idea of the story. Some are of little 
 moment, as where, in the Lorraine variant, the 
 devil's age, instead of his name, has to be guessed 
 to secure quittance from the bargain. Others, 
 as in the example of the helpful bird in the 
 Eastern story, would carry us into the wide 
 and fascinating subject of barbaric belief in 
 community between man and all living things 
 beneath him. Of the remainder, three claim 
 comment the superstitions about iron, the inci- 
 
 32 
 
INCIDENTAL FEATURES 33 
 
 dents of spinning, and of outwitting the demon or 
 other maliceful agent. 
 
 (a) SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT IRON 
 
 The reference to iron is one among other 
 examples of incidental features in folk-tales 
 which not only evidence their antiquity, but 
 throw light on the customs and beliefs embodied 
 in them, which otherwise would remain obscure. 
 The unlettered are conservative, both from fear 
 and the power of tradition. The devil may have 
 been ' the first Whig,' which, nowadays, would 
 spell Radical, but whoever, whether man or fiend, 
 challenged authority to produce its credentials, 
 has that distinction. Things new or unusual, 
 being unknown, are objects of dread in the de- 
 gree that mystery invests them ; and this ex- 
 plains, among other matters, the old ideas which 
 attached to iron, and the retention of stone 
 instruments for sacred rites and ceremonies, as, 
 for example, of flint knives, in mummy-incision, 
 among the ancient Egyptians; and among the 
 Jews in circumcision ; of obsidian or other stone 
 sacrificial knives among the Mexicans ; while in 
 
34 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 Scotland, in making the clavie, a kind of Yule- 
 tide fire-wheel, a stone hammer was used. Witches 
 and fairies are creations of the Stone Age ; the 
 peasant-folk see in the delicately shaped flint 
 arrow-heads of our Neolithic forerunners the 
 c elf-darts ' wherewith the ' good people ' maim 
 men and cattle. And the dread with which 
 these creatures are believed to regard iron ex- 
 plains its widespread use as a charm against 
 them. Old Aubrey says that 'a Horse-shoe 
 nailed on the threshold of the dore is yet in 
 fashion, and nowhere more than in London. It 
 ought (Mr. Lilly J says) to be a Horse-shoe that 
 one finds by chance on the road. The end of it 
 is to prevent the power of witches that come into 
 your house. So in Germany the common people 
 doe naile such an Horse-shoe on the threshold of 
 the doore. So neere the mainmast in ships/ 2 
 As many a stable-door and mainmast testify, the 
 nailing of horse-shoes to 'keep off the pixies," 
 and, conversely, to bring luck to farmer and 
 sailor, thrives to this day. The magical power 
 
 1 An astrologer who ' flourished ' in the reign of Charles r. 
 
 2 Remaincs of Gcntilisme and Judaisme, p. 27. 
 
OF THE STORIES 35 
 
 of iron is shown in the hero-legends wherein, for 
 example, King Arthur's wonder-working sword 
 Excalibur plays part, while homelier illustra- 
 tions are given in the use of iron tongs or scissors 
 to protect a new-born babe from being stolen by 
 the fairies. Among the Kols of India, when a 
 child is born, the umbilical cord is cut and 
 buried in the room, and over it a fire is lit in an 
 earthen pot, into which a bit of iron is put, as 
 a protection against evil spirits who may assail 
 mother or infant. 1 In county Donegal, when 
 churning is started, the tongs are put in the fire, 
 or a piece of heated iron is put under the churn, 
 and kept there till the work is finished. 2 The 
 Hindus consider it unlucky to visit the sick at 
 night, lest some prowling demon follow the 
 visitor and then haunt the invalid. But if a 
 piece of iron be taken, the demon thinks that his 
 hair may be cut therewith, whereby he becomes 
 enslaved ; so he keeps clear. The name of the 
 metal is itself an effective charm. In Arab belief 
 the zdba'ah or sand- whirl wind, which sweeps, 
 
 1 Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the North- Western Provinces, 
 vol. iii. p. 307. 2 Folklore, 1897, p. 18. 
 
36 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 pillar-like, across the land, is due to the flight of 
 a jinnee, and therefore, when its approach is 
 seen, one of the charms uttered is, ' Iron, thou 
 unlucky, 1 because the very name is believed to 
 drive the jinn away. 1 The aborigines of Vic- 
 toria thought that dust-storms were due to Koo- 
 tchee, the Australian evil spirit, and the more 
 daring among them would throw boomerangs at 
 these blinding whirlwinds. 2 
 
 (b) WOMAN AS SPINSTER AND FARMER 
 Wellnigh all the heroines in the ' Tom Tit 
 Tot' group are set the task of spinning, in a 
 magic space of time, a large quantity of flax, or, 
 as in the Swedish variant, the still harder task of 
 spinning straw into gold, and so forth. Promi- 
 nence is therefore given to the wheel and distaff 
 as woman's typical occupation. The old and 
 now discredited school of interpreters, repre- 
 sented in this country chiefly by Professor Max 
 Miiller and Sir George W. Cox, which resolved 
 every myth and folk-tale, and occasionally even 
 
 1 Lane, Modern Egyptians, ch. x. p. 204. 
 
 2 Of. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 1088. 
 
OF THE STORIES 37 
 
 history itself, 1 into solar elements, explains the 
 spinning incident as the dawn-maiden, be she 
 Penelope or the miller's daughter, weaving ' her 
 robe of clouds.' 2 But a more sober school of 
 interpretation is, like wisdom, 'justified of its 
 children. 1 That was a relatively advanced stage 
 in human progress c when Adam delved and Eve 
 span,' because among barbaric people the woman 
 does both. War and the chase fill the lives of 
 men ; and the work of handling both spade and 
 spindle falls to the women. They were the first 
 agriculturists, and over a wide area of the arable 
 earth they still ' hold the field.' While the man 
 was fighting or chasing the coveted game, the 
 woman was grubbing up roots and pounding 
 seeds or nuts to keep hunger from the hut, round 
 whose clearing she learned to sow the cereal and 
 plant the fruit-tree. In East Africa she tills the 
 soil, tends the cattle, and does the bartering; 3 
 among the Niam-Niam the men devote them- 
 
 1 ' The siege of Troy is but a repetition of the daily siege of the 
 East by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their 
 brightest treasures in the West.' Max Mliller's Science of Lan- 
 guage, vol. ii. p. 515. 
 
 2 Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, ii. p. 165. 
 
 3 Mrs. French Sheldon, Journal Anthropol. Inst., 1892, p. 362. 
 
38 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 selves to hunting, and leave the cultivation of 
 the soil to the women, who, among the Mon- 
 buttoo, do all the husbandry from hoeing to 
 harvest. 1 Herodotus (Book iv. 6) says of the 
 Thracians that 'they accounted idleness as the 
 most honourable thing, and to be a tiller of the 
 ground the most dishonourable.'' Among the 
 ancient Peruvians, farm-work fell entirely to the 
 womenfolk, while the rudest form of agriculture 
 is found among the squaws of Central California, 
 who use their fingers as hoes, rubbing the earth 
 to powder between their hands. 2 In modern 
 Palestine, although the men do the ploughing, 
 the women follow to drop the seed into the 
 furrows ; and in the Sonneberg district, in Ger- 
 many, and indeed throughout Europe, the pre- 
 paration, planting, and sowing, the harvesting 
 and thrashing, are largely done by women. It 
 is, therefore, an error to speak of fieldwork by 
 woman as a sign of her degradation ; for wher- 
 ever it now exists, although often evidencing 
 man's laziness or brutality, it is a survival of 
 
 1 Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa, vol. ii. pp. 12, 90. 
 - Mason, Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, p. 147. 
 
OFTHESTORIES 39 
 
 primitive conditions when everything domestic 
 devolved on the female. Among the indoor 
 duties were the keeping of the hearth and weav- 
 ing. With the long grass as primitive broom, 
 woman tidied the house, and with the primitive 
 spindle-stick she twisted the plant-fibres into yarn. 
 The stone spindle-whorls found among other 
 relics of early Neolithic deposits witness to the 
 high antiquity of an art which ultimately be- 
 came, both in symbol and language, the type of 
 woman's work. 1 How much this all bears on 
 her long foremost place in social organisation, 
 lies beyond our province to deal with. But, as 
 related to what follows, it must be borne in 
 mind that the roots of social unity lie in blood- 
 relationship between mother and offspring rather 
 than between father and offspring. For in the 
 unsettled conditions of barbaric life, when inter- 
 course between the sexes was irregular the 
 absence or fitful movements of the men leaving 
 the care of home and children to the women, 
 he was a wise father who knew his own child. 
 
 1 In opposition to the male or ' spear-side,' the female branch 
 of the family was formerly known as the ' spindle-side.' 
 
40 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 Birth and the early nourishment of offspring 
 were the great factors, and hence not only arose 
 the tie of blood-relationship through the mother, 
 but the tracing of descent along the female line, 
 both being grouped under what is known as 
 ' mother-right/ Thus, to quote from an able 
 essay by Mr. Karl Pearson on a subject which 
 was originally dealt with some years ago by 
 Bachofen, MacLennan, and other students of 
 ancient social groups, 'the mother would be at 
 least the nominal head of the family, the bearer 
 of its traditions, its knowledge, and its religion. 
 Hence we should expect to find that the deities 
 of a mother-right group were female, and that 
 the primitive goddesses were accompanied, not 
 by husband, but by child or brother. The hus- 
 band and father being insignificant or entirely 
 absent, there would thus easily arise myths of 
 virgin and child, and brother and sister, deities. 
 The goddess of the group would naturally be 
 served by a priestess rather than by a priest. 
 The woman, as depository of family custom and 
 tribal lore, the wise woman, the sibyl, the witch, 
 would hand down to her daughters the knowledge 
 
OF THE STORIES 41 
 
 of the religious observances, of the power of 
 herbs, the mother-lore in the mother-tongue, 
 possibly also in some form of symbol or rune, 
 such as a priestly caste love to enshroud their 
 mysteries in. The symbols of these goddesses 
 would be the symbols of woman's work and 
 woman's civilisation, the distaff, the pitchfork, 
 and the broom, not the spear, the axe, and the 
 hammer. 11 1 Herein lies the key to the femininity 
 of the larger number of corn and vegetable and 
 spinning deities, whether one or triune, ' the 
 divine mothers who travel round and visit 
 houses, from whom mankind learned the occu- 
 pations and arts of housekeeping and husbandry, 
 spinning, weaving, tending the hearth, sowing 
 and reaping. 1 2 Ceres, ' at whose nod the wheat- 
 field shakes," to whom the corn-thief, by the 
 code of the Twelve Tables, was hanged as 
 an offering ; 3 Persephone, whom Demeter seeks 
 sorrowing, to find her with the upsprouting corn ; 
 Xilomen, the Mexican maize-goddess ; Nirdu, 
 
 1 Karl Pearson, Chances of Death, and other Studies in Evolu- 
 tion, vol. ii. p. 8. 
 
 2 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 250. 
 
 3 Grainger, Worship of the Romans, p. 260. 
 
42 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 among the Teutons, one and all subordinate 
 to the mighty food-giving Earth -mother, known 
 by many names, Erda, Demeter, Pachamama, 
 Dharitri, but everywhere worshipped as the 
 giver of life, whose motherhood, as among the 
 aboriginal Americans, was no mere figure of 
 speech, but an article of positive belief. 1 Naming 
 among hearth-goddesses only the Roman Vesta, 
 the Greek Hestia, and the Teutonic Hlodyn, our 
 more immediate interest in this digression centres 
 round the spinning deities and wise women. The 
 Greeks put spindle and distaff in the hands of 
 several of their goddesses, as of Artemis, Leto, 
 and Athene, the last-named recalling to mind 
 the legend of Arachne's challenge to the goddess 
 to compete with her in the art of weaving. 
 When Arachne produced the cloth on which the 
 loves of the gods were depicted, Athene, enraged 
 at finding no fault in it, tore the work to pieces, 
 whereupon the despairing Arachne hanged her- 
 self. But Athene loosened the rope and changed 
 it into a cobweb, Arachne becoming a spider. 
 With the Greek Fates, of whom, according to 
 
 1 Payne, History of America, vol. i. p. 4G4. 
 
OFTHESTORIES 43 
 
 Hesiod, Clotho spins the web of man's destiny, 
 while Lachesis allots and Atropos cuts the 
 thread, may be compared the weaving of Helgi's 
 fate by the three Norns of Teutonic myth. 
 Stretching the golden cord across the heaven, 
 one Norn hid an end of the thread eastward, 
 another Norn hid an end westward, while a third 
 fastened it northward, the region between the 
 eastern and western ends falling to Helgi's share. 
 The hieroglyph of the great Egyptian goddess 
 Neith was a shuttle, but she lies too remote for 
 knowledge of the degree in which she was a 
 spinning deity. Not so our western Berchta and 
 Holda, round whom, and their degraded forms in 
 witches, many a legend clusters. To Holda is 
 assigned the cultivation of flax. She gives 
 spindles to industrious girls, and spins their 
 reels full for them overnight, but she burns or 
 spoils the distaffs of lazy maidens. ' On her 
 coming at Christmas, all the distaffs are well 
 stocked, and left standing for her ; by Carnival, 
 when she turns homeward, all the spinning must 
 be finished, and the staffs kept out of her sight, 
 otherwise her curse is on the disobedient. The 
 
44 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 concealment of the implements shows the sacred- 
 ness of her holy day as a time of rest ; * an idea 
 transferred, like many others, to the Virgin 
 Mary, on whose holy days spinning is forbidden. 
 Berchta spoils whatever spinning she finds un- 
 finished the last day of the year, and, ' in the 
 North, from Yule day to New Year's day, 
 neither wheel nor windlass must go round. 12 In 
 Thuringen, songs rose to Frau Holle as the 
 women dressed the flax ; and in Lower Austria, 
 Walpurg (whence the name of the great witch- 
 gathering, Walpurgisnacht) goes round the fields 
 at harvest-time with a spindle to bless them. 
 In Bavaria, 'flax will not thrive unless it is 
 sown by women, and this has to be done with 
 strange ceremonies, including the scattering 
 over the field of the ashes of a fire made of 
 wood consecrated during matins. As high as 
 the maids jump over the fires on the hilltops on 
 Midsummer Night, so high will the flax grow ; 
 but we find also that as high as the bride springs 
 from the table on her marriage night, so high 
 
 1 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 270. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 270. 
 
OF THE S TORIES 45 
 
 will the flax grow in that year. 1 In Sweden no 
 spinning is done on Thursday night, for fear of 
 offending the spirit who watches over the cattle 
 and the crops. The twisting of the thread and 
 the downward pull of the spindle might affect 
 the growth of the corn. With which examples 
 of c sympathetic magic ' (see p. 59) we may couple 
 that given by Mr. Frazer. ' In the interior of 
 Sumatra the rice is sown by women who, in 
 sowing, let their hair hang loose down their 
 back, in order that the rice may grow luxuri- 
 antly and have long stalks/ 2 The day after 
 Twelfth Day was called St. Distaffs Day, when 
 spinning was resumed, as in Herrick^s lines : 
 
 c Partly work and partly play, 
 Ye must on St. Distaffe's day ; 
 If the maids a-spinning go, 
 Burn the flax and fire the tow ; 
 Give St. Distaffe all the right, 
 Then bid Christmas sport good night.' 3 
 
 At Pergine in Tyrol, within recent years, the 
 
 1 Karl Pearson, Chances of Death, and other Studies in 
 Evolution, vol. ii. p. 36. 
 
 3 The Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 10. 
 
 3 Hcsperides, ' St. Distaffe's Day, or the Morrow after Twelfth 
 Day.' 
 
46 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 friend of the bridegroom carried a spinning- 
 wheel, with flax wound round the distaff, in the 
 wedding procession. 
 
 In these illustrations of the prominence given 
 to spinning in popular belief and ritual, no line 
 has been drawn between the part severally played 
 by goddess and by witch. Earth supplies the 
 pattern of heavenly things, and therefore the 
 gods and goddesses, with the swarm of godlings, 
 are for the most part mortals variously magnified, 
 whose deeds are the reflection of those which fill 
 the life of man. As for the witch, she may be 
 regarded as the degraded and demon-inspired 
 representative of the priestess and medicine- 
 woman, who still survive in barbaric communi- 
 ties. Weatherwise, as all folk become who, with 
 anxious outlook on the harvest of both land and 
 sea, watch the skies; skilled in the virtue of 
 simples through testing of the qualities of plants ; 
 wielder of the pitchfork, the broom, and the 
 distaff, tamer of the cat, as, in his more adven- 
 turous life, man was tamer of the wolf, making 
 the devourer of the flock to be the guardian of 
 the fold, here are the elements out of which was 
 
OFTHESTORIES 47 
 
 shaped the monstrous nightmare that terrorised 
 mankind and sent thousands to the gallows or 
 the stake. 
 
 (c) THE GULLIBLE DEVIL 
 
 The stories of the gullibility of the devil are 
 incidents in the history of his decline and fall. 
 Ridicule paved the way to a doom which com- 
 parative mythology, in explaining him, has 
 sealed. The ridicule followed his defeat in his 
 own realm of trickery and cunning by mortals. 
 It was a sincere belief among Scotch theologians 
 of the seventeenth century that his cunning so 
 increased with age that he became more than a 
 match for the cleverest. Abercromby, in his 
 Physick of the Soule, speaks of the devil 'as now 
 almost of six thousand years, and of great wily- 
 ness and experience.' But man is a combative 
 animal, and the feeling that the devil was ever 
 on the watch to trip him up or outwit him, 
 warmed rather than chilled his fighting instinct. 
 In the belief that the devil's favourite method 
 was the bargaining for both body and soul, that 
 he might win both, the spirit of rivalry in the 
 
48 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 game of huckstering was aroused, so that it be- 
 came a contest of ' pull devil, pull baker,' as the 
 saying goes. As the old legends show, and as is 
 also manifest in the 'Tom Tit Tof group of 
 stories, he is the transformed giant or wizard with 
 the superadded features of the fiend whose aim it 
 is to induce the unwary to agree to sell them- 
 selves to him at the price of some fleeting advan- 
 tage. Hence, when he is checkmated, great is 
 the joy at the discomfiture of the ' stupid beast, 1 
 as Pope Gregory the Great called him. And of 
 this defeat many a legend tells. In northern 
 saga, King Olaf desired to build a church greater 
 than any yet seen, but lacked the means to 
 accomplish this. As he walked 'twixt hill and 
 dale he met a troll, who, when he heard the 
 king's wish, offered to build the church for him 
 within a given time, stipulating that he was to 
 have the sun and moon, or Olaf himself, in 
 payment. The king agreed ; the church was to 
 be large enough to allow seven priests to preach 
 in it at the same time without disturbing one 
 another, and ere long the structure was finished, 
 except the roof and spire. Perplexed at the 
 
OFTHESTORIES 49 
 
 bargain which he had made, Olaf once more 
 wandered over hill and dale, when suddenly he 
 heard a child cry from within a mountain, while 
 a giantess quieted it with these words, 'Hush, 
 hush, to-morrow comes thy father, Wind and 
 Weather, home, bringing both sun and moon, or 
 saintly Olafs self. 1 Overjoyed at this discovery, 
 the king turned home, arriving just in time to 
 see the spire being fixed. He cried out, ' Wind 
 and Weather, thou hast set the spire askew," 
 when instantly the giant fell off the ridge of the 
 roof with a fearful crash, and burst into a thou- 
 sand pieces, which were nothing but flint stones. 1 
 In Swedish legend a giant promises to build a 
 church for the White Christ, if Laurentius can 
 find out his name, otherwise he must forfeit his 
 eyes. As in the Olaf story, the giantess is 
 overheard hushing her crying child and uttering 
 the giant's name. 2 
 
 In the great collection of Welsh manuscripts 
 published by Owen Jones in the beginning of 
 this century, the story of the battle of Achren 
 
 1 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, pp. 547, 548. 
 
 2 Cp. Arnason, Icelandic Legends, p. 49, where the story hinges 
 on the name of the builder in ' Who built Reynir Church ? ' 
 
50 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 precedes some verses. It was fought on account 
 of a white roebuck and a puppy which were of 
 Hades. Amathaon, son of Don, had caught them. 
 Therefore he fought with Arawn, King of Hades, 
 and there was in the engagement on the side of 
 Hades a man who could not be vanquished unless 
 his name could be discovered ; while there was 
 a woman on the other side called Achren, whose 
 name was to be found out before her side could 
 be vanquished. Gwydion, so. of Don, guessed 
 the man's name, and sang tJLe two following 
 englyns. They are the verses alluded to, and 
 they embody Gwyd ion's guess as to the man's 
 name, which he discovered to be Bran; and as 
 Bran, which means a ' crow,' is one of the appel- 
 lations of the terrene god, he may be supposed 
 to have been a principal in the fight, that is to 
 say, he was probably the King of Hades him- 
 self. 1 Cognate with the foregoing legend of the 
 discomfiture of the devil is that which tells how he 
 agrees to build a house for a peasant at the price 
 of the man's soul, the contract to be null and 
 void if the work is not finished before cockcrow. 
 
 1 Prof. Rhys, Hibbcrt Lectures, p. -J-i i. 
 
OF THE STORIES 51 
 
 Just as day dawns, and as the devil is putting 
 on the last tile, the peasant wakens up all the 
 roosters by imitating their crowing. Or the 
 devil helps to construct a bridge on condition 
 that he receives in payment the soul of the first 
 thing that crosses it, and while he is on the 
 watch to seize his prize, a chamois or dog rushes 
 past him. In the well-known story of the 
 shadowless man, the devil agrees to take the 
 hindmost in a race, and is able to grasp only 
 the shadow of the rearmost runner. The fiend 
 is also befooled by one man, who whistles the 
 Gospel which he has bound himself not to say, 
 and by the refusal of another to carry out his 
 bargain at the fall of the leaf because the foliage 
 sculptured on the church columns is still on the 
 boughs. In the venerable street play of ' Punch 
 and Judy ' the climax is reached when, after 
 shamming defeat by the devil, Punch seizes him 
 and strings him to the gallows. The story is 
 told of some angry lookers-on stoning a show- 
 man who reversed the traditions of the play 
 by letting the devil carry off Punch. These 
 examples, of which a store may be gathered 
 
52 INCIDENTAL FEATURES 
 
 from Grimm, Thorpe, and other collectors, 1 
 fall into line with the typical incident of the 
 befooling and discomfiture of the demon in one 
 shape or sex and another in ' Tom Tit Tot ' and 
 his variants, along the main track of which group 
 of folk-tales we may now advance without further 
 digression. 
 
 1 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, pp. 1018-1024 ; Thorpe, Northern 
 Mythology, vol. ii. p. 177 ; Dasent, Popular Talcs from the 
 Norse, xcvii ; Crane, Italian Talcs, p. 221 ; Clouston, Popular 
 Tales and Fictions, vol. i. p. 381. 
 
BARBARIC IDEAS ABOUT NAMES 
 
 BEFORE the discovery of iron ; before the inven- 
 tion of the art of spinning ; before the formula- 
 tion of the theory of spirits, against whose wiles 
 mortals might successfully plot, men had found 
 the necessity of inventing signs or symbols where- 
 with to distinguish one another. Airiong these 
 was the choice of personal names, and it is in 
 this that the justification exists for assuming the 
 name-incident in ' Tom Tit Tot ' to be probably 
 the most archaic element in the story. Barbaric 
 man believes that his name is a vital part of 
 himself, and therefore that the names of other 
 men and of superhuman beings are also vital 
 parts of themselves. He further believes that 
 to know the name is to put its owner, whether 
 he be deity, ghost, or mortal, in the power of 
 
 53 
 
54 . BARBARIC IDEAS 
 
 another, involving risk of harm or destruction 
 to the named. He therefore takes all kinds of 
 precautions to conceal his name, often from his 
 friend, and always from his foe. This belief, and 
 the resulting acts, as will be shown presently, 
 are a part of that general confusion between 
 the objective and the subjective in other 
 words, between names and things or between 
 symbols and realities which is a universal feature 
 of barbaric modes of thought. This confusion 
 attributes the qualities of living things to things 
 not living ; it lies at the root of all fetichism and 
 idolatry ; of all witchcraft, shamanism, and other 
 instruments which are as keys to the invisible 
 kingdom of the dreaded. Where such ideas 
 prevail, everything becomes a vehicle of magic, 
 and magic, be it remembered, rules the life of 
 the savage. It is, as Adolf Bastian aptly remarks, 
 'the physics of mankind in a state of nature,' 
 because in the perception, however blurred or 
 dim, of some relation between things, science is 
 born. To look for any consistency in barbaric 
 philosophy is to disqualify ourselves for under- 
 standing it, and the theories of it which aim at 
 
ABOUT NAMES 55 
 
 symmetry are their own condemnation. Yet 
 that philosophy, within its own irregular con- 
 fines, works not illogically. Ignorant of the 
 properties of things, but ruled by the superficial 
 likenesses which many exhibit, the barbaric mind 
 regards them as vehicles of good or evil, chiefly 
 evil, because things are feared in the degree that 
 they are unknown, and because, where life is 
 mainly struggle, man is ever on the watch against 
 malice-working agencies, wizards, medicine-men, 
 and all their kin. That he should envisage the 
 intangible that his name should be an entity, 
 an integral part of himself, may the less surprise 
 us when it is remembered that language, from 
 the simple phrases of common life to the highest 
 abstract terms, rests on the concrete. To ' appre- 
 hend ' a thing is to ' seize ' or c lay hold ' of it ; 
 to c possess ' a thing is to c sit by ' or ' beset ' it. 
 To call one man a ' sycophant ' is to borrow the 
 term ' fig-blabber, 1 applied by the Greeks to the 
 informer against those who broke the Attic law 
 prohibiting the export of figs ; to call another 
 man ' supercilious ' is to speak of him as ' raising 
 his eyebrows ' ; while, as we all know, the terms 
 
56 BARBARIC IDEAS ABOUT NAMES 
 
 ' disaster ' and ' lunatic ' preserve the old belief in 
 the influence of the heavenly bodies on human 
 life. Even the substantive verb 'to be,** the 
 'most bodiless and colourless of all our words," 
 is made up of the relics of several verbs which 
 once had a distinct physical significance. 'Be' 
 contained the idea of 'growing'; 'am, art, is, 1 
 and ' are, 1 the idea of ' sitting ' ; ' was ' and ' were," 
 that of ' dwelling ' or ' abiding." 
 
VI 
 
 MAGIC THROUGH TANGIBLE THINGS 
 
 THE dread of being harmed through so in- 
 tangible a thing as his name, which haunts the 
 savage, is the extreme and more subtle form of 
 the same dread which, for a like reason, makes 
 him adopt precautions against cuttings of his 
 hair, parings of his nails, his saliva, excreta, and 
 the water in which his clothes when he wears 
 any are washed, falling under the control of 
 the sorcerer. Miss Mary Kingsley says that 
 4 the fear of nail and hair clippings getting into 
 the hands of evilly disposed persons is ever pre- 
 sent to the West African. The Igalwa and 
 other tribes will allow no one but a trusted 
 friend to do their hair, and bits of nails or hair 
 are carefully burnt or thrown away into a river. 
 Blood, even that from a small cut on the finger, 
 
 57 
 
58 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 or from a fit of nose-bleeding, is most carefully 
 covered up and stamped out if it has fallen on 
 the earth. Blood is the life, and life in Africa 
 means a spirit, hence the liberated blood is the 
 liberated spirit, and liberated spirits are always 
 whipping into people who don't want them.' 1 
 Crammed with Pagan superstitions, the Italian 
 who is reluctant to trust a lock of his hair to 
 another stands on the same plane as the barbarian. 
 Sometimes, as was the custom among the Incas, 
 and as is still the custom among Turks and 
 Esthonians, the refuse of hair and nails is pre- 
 served so that the owner may have them at the 
 resurrection of the body. 2 In connection with 
 this, one of my sons tells me that his Jamaican 
 negro housekeeper speaks of the old-time blacks 
 keeping their hair-cuttings to be put in a pillow 
 in their coffins, and preserving the parings of 
 their nails, because they would need them in the 
 next world. It is a common superstition among 
 ourselves that when children's teeth come out 
 they should not be thrown away, lest the child 
 
 1 Travels in West Africa, p. 447. 
 
 2 The (Inltlm. /ioHtili, vol. i. p. 'J(K' 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 59 
 
 has to seek for the lost tooth after death. On 
 the other hand, it is an equally common practice 
 to throw the teeth in the fire ' out of harm's way.' 
 But the larger number of practices give ex- 
 pression to the belief in what is known as ' sym- 
 pathetic magic ' ; as we say, ' like cures like,' or 
 more appositely, in barbaric theory, ' kills like. 1 
 Things outwardly resembling one another are 
 believed to possess the same qualities, effects 
 being thereby brought about in the man himself 
 by the production of like effects in things belong- 
 ing to him, or in images or effigies of him. The 
 Zulu sorcerers, when they have secured a portion 
 of their victim's dress, will bury it in some secret 
 place, so that, as it rots away, his life may decay. 
 In the New Hebrides it was the common practice 
 to hide nail-parings and cuttings of hair, and to 
 give the remains of food carefully to the pigs. 
 'When the mae snake carried away a fragment 
 of food into the place sacred to a spirit, the man 
 who had eaten of the food would sicken as the 
 fragment decayed.' l Brand tells that in a witch- 
 craft trial in the seventeenth century, the accused 
 1 Codrington, Melanesians, p. 203. 
 
60 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 confessed ' having buried a glove of the said Lord 
 Henry in the ground, so that as the glove did 
 rot and waste, the liver of the said lord might 
 rot and waste' ; and the New Britain sorcerer of 
 to-day will burn a castaway banana skin, so that 
 the man who carelessly left it unburied may die 
 a tormenting death. A fever-stricken Australian 
 native girl told the doctor who attended her that 
 ( some moons back, when the Goulburn blacks 
 were encamped near Melbourne, a young man 
 named Gibberook came behind her and cut off 
 a lock of her hair, and that she was sure he had 
 buried it, and that it was rotting somewhere. 
 Her marm-bu-la (kidney fat) was wasting away, 
 and when the stolen hair had completely rotted 
 she would die. 1 She added that her name had 
 been lately cut on a tree by some wild black, and 
 that was another sign of death. Her name was 
 Murran, which means c a leaf, 1 and the doctor 
 afterwards found that the figure of leaves had 
 been carved on a gum-tree as described by the 
 girl. The sorceress said that the spirit of a 
 black fellow had cut the figure on the tree. 1 
 
 1 Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i. p. KJS. 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 6l 
 
 The putting of sharp stones in the foot-tracks 
 of an enemy is believed to maim him, as a nail 
 is driven into a horse's footprint to lame him, 1 
 while the chewing of a piece of wood is thought 
 to soften the heart of a man with whom a 
 bargain is being driven. Folk -medicine, the wide 
 world through, is full of prescriptions based on 
 sympathetic or antipathetic magic. Its doctrine 
 of c seals "* or ' signatures ' is expressed in the 
 use of yellow flowers for jaundice, and of eye- 
 bright for ophthalmia, while among the wonder- 
 working roots there is the familiar mandrake of 
 human shape, credited, in virtue of that resem- 
 blance, with magic power. In Umbria, where 
 the peasants seek to nourish the consumptive on 
 rosebuds and dew, the mothers take their children, 
 wasted by sickness, to some boundary stone, per- 
 chance once sacred to Hermes, and pray to God 
 to stay the illness or end the sufferer's life. The 
 Cheroki make a decoction of the cone-flower for 
 weak eyes because of the fancied resemblance of 
 that plant to the strong-sighted eye of the deer ; 
 and they also drink an infusion of the tenacious 
 
 1 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 1093. 
 
62 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 burrs of the common beggars' lice, an American 
 species of the genus Desmodium, to strengthen 
 the memory. To ensure a fine voice, they boil 
 crickets, and drink the liquor. In Suffolk and 
 other parts of these islands, a common remedy 
 for warts is to secretly pierce a snail or c dodman ' 
 with a gooseberry-bush thorn, rub the snail on 
 the wart, and then bury it, so that, as it decays, 
 the wart may wither away. 
 
 Chinese doctors administer the head, middle, 
 or roots of plants, as the case may be, to cure 
 the complaints of their patients in the head, 
 body, or legs. And with the practice of the 
 Zulu medicine-man, who takes the bones of the 
 oldest bull or dog of the tribe, giving scrapings 
 of these to the sick, so that their lives may be 
 prolonged to old age, 1 we may compare that of 
 doctors in the seventeenth century, who with less 
 logic, but perchance unconscious humour, gave 
 their patients pulverised mummy to prolong their 
 years. 2 ' Mummie," says Sir Thomas Browne, ' is 
 
 1 Bishop Callaway, Zulu Nursery Talcs, p. 175. 
 
 " Lang's Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. p. 90. The inclu- 
 sion of mummy in. the old pharmacopoeias was perhaps due to 
 certain virtues in the aromatics used in embalinhu:. 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 63 
 
 become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, 
 and Pharaoh is sold for balsams." l 
 
 In Plutarch's Roman Questions, which Dr. 
 Jevons, in his valuable preface to the reprint 
 of Philemon Holland's translation, 2 remarks 
 'may fairly be said to be the earliest formal 
 treatise written on the subject of folk-lore,' 
 reference is made to the Roman customs of not 
 completely clearing the table of food, and ' never 
 putting foorth the light of a lampe, but suffering 
 it to goe out of the owne accord.' These obviously 
 come under the head of sympathetic magic, ' being 
 safeguards against starvation and darkness.' In 
 Melanesia, if a man wounds another with an 
 arrow, he will drink hot juices and chew irritat- 
 ing leaves to bring about agony to the wounded, 
 and he will keep his bow taut, pulling it at 
 intervals to cause nerve-tension and tetanus in his 
 victim. Here, though wide seas between them 
 roll, we may compare the same philosophy of 
 things at work. The 6 sympathetic powder ' used 
 by Sir Kenelm Digby in the seventeenth century 
 
 1 Urn-Burial, iii. p. 4G (collected works). 
 
 2 Bibliotheque de Carabas, vol. vii. (Nutt, 1892). 
 
64 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 was believed to cure a wound if applied to the 
 sword that inflicted it; and, to-day, the Suffolk 
 farmer keeps the sickle with which he has cut 
 himself free from rust, so that the wound may 
 not fester. Here, too, lies the answer to the 
 question that puzzled Plutarch. ' What is the 
 reason that of all those things which be dedicated 
 and consecrated to the gods, the custome is at 
 Rome, that onely the spoiles of enemies con- 
 quered in the warres are neglected and suffered to 
 run to decay in processe of time : neither is there 
 any reverence done unto them, nor repaired be 
 they at any time when they wax olde ?' Of 
 course the custom is the outcome of the belief 
 that the enemy's power waned as his armour 
 rusted away. 
 
 Equally puzzling to Plutarch was the custom 
 among Roman women ' of the most noble and 
 auncient houses' to 'carry little moones upon 
 their shoes. 1 These were of the nature of amulets, 
 designed to deceive the lunacy-bringing moon- 
 spirit, so that it might enter the crescent charm 
 instead of the wearer. ' The Chaldeans diverted 
 the spirit of disease from the sick man by pro- 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 65 
 
 viding an image in the likeness of the spirit to 
 attract the plague."* l ' Make of it an image in 
 his likeness (i.e. of Namtar, the plague); apply 
 it to the living flesh of his body (i.e. of the sick 
 man), may the malevolent Namtar who possesses 
 him pass into the image.' 2 But the reverse effect 
 was more frequently the aim. A Chaldean tablet 
 records the complaint of some victim, that ' he 
 who enchants images has charmed away my life 
 by image '; and Ibn Khaldun, an Arabian writer of 
 the fourteenth century, describes how the Naba- 
 thean sorcerers of the Lower Euphrates made an 
 image of the person whom they plotted to destroy. 
 They transcribed his name on his effigy, uttered 
 magic curses over it, and then, after divers other 
 ceremonies, left the evil spirits to complete the 
 fell work. 3 In ancient Egyptian belief the ka of 
 a living person could be transferred to a wax 
 image by the repetition of formulae ; and there is 
 no break in the long centuries between Accadian 
 magic, which so profoundly influenced the West, 
 and the practice of injuring a man through his 
 
 1 Jevons, Plutarch's Romanc Questions, p. 79. 
 
 2 Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 51. 
 
 3 Ib. p. 63. 
 
 E 
 
66 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 image, which flourishes to-day. The Ojibways 
 believe that ' by drawing the figure of any person 
 in sand or clay, or by considering any object as 
 the figure of a person, and then pricking it with 
 a sharp stick or other weapon, or doing any- 
 thing that would be done to the living body to 
 cause pain or death, the person thus represented 
 will suffer likewise.' 1 King James i., in his 
 Dcemonology, Book n. ch. v., speaks of ' the devil 
 teaching how to make pictures of wax or clay, 
 that by roasting thereof the persons that they 
 bear the name of may be continually melted or 
 dried away by sickness,** and, as showing the con- 
 tinuity of the idea, there are exhibited in the Pitt 
 Rivers Museum at Oxford, besides similar objects 
 from the Straits Settlements, a ' Corp Creidh ' 
 or ' clay body ' from the Highlands, and a pig's 
 heart from Devonshire, with pins stuck in them. 
 The assumed correspondence between physical 
 phenomena and human actions is further shown 
 in Dr. Johnson's observation, when describing his 
 visit to the Hebrides, that the peasants expect 
 better crops by sowing their seed at the new 
 
 1 Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, p. 139. 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 67 
 
 moon ; and he recalls from memory a precept 
 annually given in the almanack, 'to kill hogs when 
 the moon is waxing, that the bacon may prove 
 the better in boiling/ With the ancient Roman 
 custom of throwing images of the corn-spirit 
 (doubtless substitutes of actual human offerings) 
 into the river, so that the crops might be 
 drenched with rain, we may compare the practice 
 of the modern Servians and Thessalians, who 
 strip a little girl naked, but wrap her completely 
 in leaves and flowers, and then dance and sing 
 round her, while bowls of water are poured over 
 her to make the rain come. The life of man 
 pulsates with the great heart of nature in many 
 a touching superstition, as in the belief in the 
 dependence of the earth's fertility on the vigour of 
 the tree-spirit incarnated in the priest-king ; 1 in 
 the group which connects the waning of the days 
 with the decline of human years ; and, pathetic- 
 ally enough, in the widespread notion, of which 
 Dickens makes use in David Copperfield, that life 
 goes out with the ebb-tide. 
 
 ' I was on the point of asking him if he knew me, 
 
 i See infra, p. 150. 
 
68 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 when he tried to stretch out his arm, and said to 
 me, distinctly, with a pleasant smile, " Barkis is 
 willin'." 
 
 e And, it being low water, he went out with the 
 tide/ 
 
 The general idea has only to be decked in 
 another garb to fit the frame of mind which still 
 reserves some pet sphere of nature for the opera- 
 tion of the special and the arbitrary. 'The 
 narrower the range of man's knowledge of phy- 
 sical causes, the wider is the field which he has 
 to fill up with hypothetical causes of a meta- 
 physical or supernatural character.' 1 
 
 We must not pass from these examples of belief 
 in sympathetic connection, drawn from home as 
 well as foreign sources, without reference to its 
 significance in connection with food outside the 
 prohibitions which are usually explained by the 
 totem, that is, abstinence from the plant or 
 animal which is regarded as the tribal ancestor. 
 
 Captain Wells, who was killed near Chicago in 
 1812, and who was celebrated for his valour 
 among the Indians, was cut up into many parts, 
 which were distributed among the allied tribes, so 
 
 1 Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. p. 88. 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 69 
 
 that all might have the opportunity of getting a 
 taste of the courageous soldier. For it is a com- 
 mon belief among barbaric folk that by eating 
 the flesh of a brave man a portion of his courage 
 is absorbed. The Botecudos sucked the blood 
 of living victims that they might imbibe spiri- 
 tual force, and among the Brazilian natives the 
 first food given to a child, when weaning it, was 
 the flesh of an enemy. 1 Cannibalism, the origin 
 of which is probably due to a scarcity of animal 
 food, therefore acquires this superadded motive, 
 in which also lies the explanation of the eating 
 of, or abstaining from, the flesh of certain animals. 
 The lion's flesh gives courage, the deer's flesh 
 causes timidity ; and in more subtle form of the 
 same idea, barbaric hunters will abstain from 
 oil lest the game slip through their fingers. 
 Contrariwise, the Hessian lad thinks that he 
 may escape the conscription by carrying a baby- 
 girPs cap in his pocket : a symbolic way of repu- 
 diating manhood. 2 
 
 Most suggestive of all is the extension of the 
 
 1 Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, p. 149. 
 
 2 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 107. 
 
70 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 idea to the eating of the slain god, whereby his 
 spirit is imbibed, and communion with the unseen 
 secured. To quote Mr. Frazer, the savage believes 
 that ' by eating the body of the god he shares in 
 the god's attributes and powers; and when the 
 god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body ; 
 when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is 
 his blood; and so, by eating the bread and drink- 
 ing the wine, the worshipper partakes of the real 
 body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking 
 of wine in the rite of a vine-god, like Dionysus, 
 is not an act of revelry ; it is a solemn sacrament. 1 x 
 Experience shows that people possessing intelli- 
 gence above the ordinary often fail to see the 
 bearing of one set of facts upon another set, 
 especially if the application can be made to 
 their traditional beliefs, whether these are only 
 mechanically held, or ardently defended. It is, 
 therefore, not wholly needless to point out that 
 Mr. Frazer's explanation is to be extended to the 
 rites attaching to Christianity, t ran substantiation 
 being, laterally 2 or lineally, the descendant of the 
 
 1 Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 89. 
 
 2 See, on this matter, Professor Percy Gardner's tract on the 
 Origin of the Lord's Supper, pp. 18-20 (Macmillan aud Co.). 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 71 
 
 barbaric idea of eating the god, whereby the 
 communicant becomes a ' partaker of the divine 
 nature.' In connection with this we may cite Pro- 
 fessor Robertson Smith's remark, that a notable 
 application of the idea of eating the flesh or drink- 
 ing the blood of another being, so that a man 
 absorbs its nature or life into his own, is the rite 
 of blood-brotherhood, the simplest form of which 
 is in two men opening their veins and sucking 
 one another's blood. ' Thenceforth their lives are 
 not two, but one.' l Among the Unyamuezi the 
 ceremony is performed by cutting incisions in each 
 other's legs and letting the blood trickle together. 2 
 Fuller reference to this widely diffused rite will, 
 however, have more fitting place later on, 
 when treating of the custom of the exchange of 
 names which, as will be seen, often goes with it. 
 Belief in virtue inhering in the dead man's body 
 involves belief in virtue in his belongings, in 
 which is the key to the belief in the efficacy of 
 relics as vehicles of supernatural power. Here 
 the continuity is clearly traceable. There is no 
 
 1 Religion of the Semites, p. 296. 
 
 2 Speke, Journal of Discovery of the Source of the Nile, p. 96. 
 
72 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 fundamental difference between the savage who 
 carries about with him the skull-bones of his 
 ancestor as a charm or seat of oracle, and the 
 Buddhist who places the relics of holy men be- 
 neath the tope, or the Catholic who deposits the 
 fragments of saints or martyrs within the altar 
 which their presence sanctifies ; while the mother, 
 treasuring her dead child's lock of hair, witnesses 
 to the vitality of feelings drawn from perennial 
 springs in human nature. Well-nigh every relic 
 which the Church safeguards beneath her shrines, 
 or exhibits, at stated seasons, for the adoration 
 of the crowd, is spurious, 1 yet no amount of ridi- 
 cule thrown on these has impaired the credulity 
 whose strength lies in the dominance of the wish 
 to believe over the desire to know. 2 
 
 In 'Whuppity Stoorie" the widow and the 
 witch ' watted thooms ' over their bargain. Man's 
 
 1 On the manufacture of and traffic in relics, see Froude, 
 Erasmus, p. 128; Gregorovius, Hist, of Rome in the Middle 
 Ages, vol. ii. pp. 73-77 ; iii. pp. 72-75. 
 
 2 In John Hey wood's Enterlude of the Four P's (a Palmer, a 
 Pardoner, a 'Poticary, and a Pedlar), the author, a sixteenth- 
 century writer of Morality Plays, did not allow his staunch 
 Catholicism to hinder his flinging some coarse satire at the relic- 
 mongers. He represents the Pardoner as exhibiting, among other 
 curios, the jaw-bone of All Saints, a buttock-bone of the Holy 
 Ghost, and the great toe of the Trinity. 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 73 
 
 saliva plays a smaller, but by no means inactive, 
 part in his superstitions. A goodly-sized book 
 might be written on the history and ethnic dis- 
 tribution of the customs connected with it. 
 Employed as vehicle of blessing or cursing, of 
 injury or cure, by peoples intellectually as far 
 apart as the Jews, the South Sea Islanders, the 
 mediaeval Christians, and the Central Africans of 
 to-day, the potencies of this normally harmless 
 secretion have been most widely credited. 1 
 Among ourselves it is a vehicle of one of the 
 coarsest forms of assault, or the degenerate repre- 
 sentative of the old luck-charm in the spitting 
 on money by the cabman or the costermonger. 
 Among certain barbaric races, however, the act 
 expresses the kindliest feeling and the highest 
 compliment. Consul Petherick says that a 
 Sudanese chief, after grasping his hand, spat on 
 it, and then did the like to his face, a form of 
 salute which the consul returned with interest, to 
 the delight of the recipient. Among the Masai 
 the same custom is universal ; and while it is bad 
 
 1 Art. on ' Saliva Superstitions,' by Fanny D. Bergen, American 
 Folk-Lore Soc. Journal, vol. iii. p. 52. 
 
74 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 form to kiss a lady, it is comme il jaut to spit on 
 her. 1 The authority who reports this adds an 
 account of certain generative virtues with which 
 saliva, especially if administered by a white man, 
 is accredited. 2 But it is as a prophylactic, notably 
 in the form of fasting spittle, and as a protection 
 against sorcery and all forms of black magic, that 
 we meet with frequent references to it in ancient 
 writers, and in modern books of travel. ' Spittle,' 
 says Brand, 'was esteemed a charm against all 
 kinds of fascination,' 3 notably against the evil 
 eye, the remedy for which, still in vogue among 
 the Italians, is to spit three times upon the 
 breast, as did the urban maiden in Theocritus 
 when she refused her rustic wooer. It came out 
 in the course of a murder trial at Philippopolis, 
 that the Bulgarians believe that spitting gives 
 immunity from the consequences of perjury. 4 An 
 example of its use in benediction occurs, as when 
 the Abomel of Alzpirn spat on his clergy and laity; 
 but more familiar are the cases of its application 
 
 1 Joseph Thomson, Through Masai Land, p. 100. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 105. 
 
 3 Popular Antiquities, iii. p. 228 (Hazlitt's edition). 
 
 4 Westminster Gazette, 28th July 1897. 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 75 
 
 in baptism and name-giving. Seward says that 
 4 the custom of nurses lustrating the children by 
 spittle was one of the ceremonies used on the 
 Dies Nominalis, the day the child was named ; 
 so that there can be no doubt of the Papists 
 deriving this custom from the heathen nurses and 
 grandmothers. They have indeed christened it, 
 as it were, by flinging in some Scriptural expres- 
 sions ; but then they have carried it to a more 
 filthy extravagance by daubing it on the nostrils 
 of adults as well as of children/ 1 Ockley tells 
 that when Hasan was born, his grandfather, 
 Mohammed, spat in his mouth as he named him ; 
 and Mungo Park thus describes the name-giving 
 ceremony among the Mandingo people. 'A 
 child is named when it is seven or eight days old. 
 The ceremony commences by shaving the head. 
 The priest offers a prayer, in which he solicits the 
 blessing of God upon the child and all the com- 
 pany, and then whispering a few sentences in the 
 child's ear, spits three times in his face, after 
 which, pronouncing his name aloud, he returns 
 the child to its mother. 1 
 
 1 Conformity between Popery and Paganism, p. 14 ; Brand, iii. 
 p. 229. 
 
76 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 All which, of course, has vital connection with 
 the belief in inherent virtue in saliva, and there- 
 fore with the widespread group of customs which 
 have for their object the prevention of its falling 
 within the power of the sorcerer. Suabian folk- 
 medicine prescribes that the saliva should at once 
 be trodden into the ground lest some evil-disposed 
 person use it for sorcery. As the result of ex- 
 tensive acquaintance with the North American 
 Indians, Captain Bourke says that all of them 
 are careful to spit into their cloaks or blankets ; 
 and Kane adds his testimony that the natives of 
 Columbia River are never seen to spit without 
 carefully stamping out the saliva. This they do 
 lest an enemy should find it, and work injury 
 through it. The chief officer of the ' king ' of 
 Congo receives the royal saliva in a rag, which 
 he doubles up and kisses ; while in Hawaii the 
 guardianship of the monarch's expectorations was 
 intrusted only to a chief of high rank, who 
 held the dignified office of spittoon-bearer to the 
 king, and who, like his fellow-holders of the same 
 trust under other Polynesian rulers, buried the 
 saliva beyond the reach of malicious medicine- 
 
TANGIBLE THINGS 77 
 
 men. Finally, as bearing on the absence of any 
 delimiting lines between a man's belongings, 
 there may be cited Brandos reference to Debrio. 
 He ' portrays the manners and ideas of the con- 
 tinent, and mentions that upon those hairs which 
 come out of the head in combing they spit thrice 
 before they throw them away.' x 
 
 The reluctance of savages to have their por- 
 traits taken is explicable when brought into 
 relation with the group of confused ideas under 
 review. Naturally, the man thinks that virtue 
 has gone out of him, that some part of his vul- 
 nerable self is put at the mercy of his fellows, 
 when he sees his ' counterfeit presentment ' on a 
 sheet of paper, or peering from out magic glass. 
 The reluctance of unlettered people among our- 
 selves to have their likenesses taken is not un- 
 common. From Scotland to Somerset 2 there 
 comes evidence about the ill-health or ill-luck 
 which followed the camera, of folks who ' took 
 bad and died 1 after being 'a-tookt. 1 These 
 facts will remove any surprise at Catlings well- 
 
 1 Pop. Antiq. iii. p. 231. 
 
 2 Napier, Folklore of West Scotland, p. 142 ; Elworthy, Evil 
 Eye, p. 86. 
 
78 MAGIC THROUGH TANGIBLE THINGS 
 
 known story of the accusation brought against 
 him by the Yukons that he had made buffaloes 
 scarce by putting so many pictures of them in 
 his book. 1 
 
 1 Dorman, p. 140. 
 
VII 
 
 MAGIC THROUGH INTANGIBLE 
 THINGS 
 
 THE examples of belief in a man's tangible 
 belongings as vehicles of black magic will have 
 paved the way for examples of like belief about 
 intangible things, as shadows, reflections, and 
 names. 
 
 The savage knows nothing of the action of 
 the laws of interference of light or sound. The 
 echoes of voices which the hillside flings back ; 
 the reflections which water casts ; and the shadows 
 which follow or precede, and which lengthen or 
 shorten, a man's figure ; all unite in supporting 
 the theory of another self. The Basuto avoids 
 the river-bank, lest, as his shadow falls on the 
 water, a crocodile may seize it, and harm the 
 owner. In Wetar Island, near Celebes, the 
 
 79 
 
80 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 magicians profess to make a man ill by spearing 
 or stabbing his shadow ; the Arabs believe that 
 if a hyaena treads on a shadow, it deprives the 
 man of the power of speech ; and in modern 
 Roumania the ancient custom of burying a 
 victim as sacrifice to the earth-spirit under any 
 new structure, has survival in the builder en- 
 ticing some passer-by to draw near, so that his 
 shadow is thrown on the foundation-stone, the 
 belief being that he will die within the year. 
 New England tribes call the soul chemung or 
 shadow, and civilised speech indicates community 
 of idea in the skia of the Greeks, the manes or 
 umbra of the Romans, and the shade of our own 
 language. But any due enlargement of this 
 department of the subject would fill no small 
 volume, since it involves the story of the origin 
 and development of spiritual ideas ruling the 
 life of man from the dawn of thought ; and, 
 moreover, those ideas find sufficing illustration 
 in savage notions about names. 
 
 Starting at the bottom of the scale, we have 
 Mr. Brough Smyth's testimony that the Vic- 
 toria black-fellows are very unwilling to tell 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 81 
 
 their real names, and that this reluctance is 
 due to the fear of putting themselves at the 
 mercy of sorcerers. 1 Backhouse says that the 
 Tasmanians showed great dislike to their names 
 being mentioned. 
 
 Among the Tshi-speaking tribes of West 
 Africa, ' a man's name is always concealed from 
 all but his nearest relatives, and to other persons 
 he is always known by an assumed name, 1 a nick- 
 name, as we should say. 2 The Ewe-speaking 
 peoples ' believe in a real and material con- 
 nection between a man and his name, and that, 
 by means of the name, injury may be done to 
 the man." 3 Mr. Im Thurn says that, although 
 the Indians of British Guiana have an intricate 
 system of names, it is c of little use in that the 
 owners have a very strong objection to telling 
 or using them, apparently on the ground that 
 the name is part of the man, and that he who 
 knows it has part of the owner of that name in 
 his power. To avoid any danger of spreading 
 
 1 Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i. p. 469. 
 
 2 Sir A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 
 p. 109. 
 
 3 The Ewe-speaking Peoples, p. 98. 
 
82 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 knowledge of their names, one Indian, therefore, 
 usually addresses another only according to the 
 relationship of the caller and the called. But 
 an Indian is just as unwilling to tell his proper 
 name to a white man as to an Indian ; and as, 
 of course, between those two there is no relation- 
 ship the term for which can serve as a proper 
 name, the Indian asks the European to give him 
 a name, which is usually written on a piece of 
 paper by the donor, and shown by the Indian to 
 any white who asks his name.'' 1 The Indians of 
 British Columbia and the prej udice ' appears to 
 pervade all tribes alike" dislike telling their 
 names ; thus you never get a man's right name 
 from himself, but they will tell each other's 
 names without hesitation. 2 In correspondence 
 with this, the Abipones of South America would 
 nudge their neighbour to answer for them when 
 any one among them was asked his name ; and 
 the natives of the Fiji Islands would get any third 
 party who might be present to answer as to their 
 names. 3 An Indian asked Dr. Kane whether his 
 
 1 Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 220. 
 
 2 Mayne, British Colwtnbia, p. 278. 
 
 3 Farrer, Primitii > -^ and Customs, p. "110. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 83 
 
 wish to know his name arose from a desire to 
 steal it ; and the Araucanians would not allow 
 their names to be told to strangers lest these 
 should be used in sorcery. Among the Ojibways, 
 husbands and wives never told each other's 
 names, and children were warned that they 
 would stop growing if they repeated their own 
 names. Of the Abipones just named, Dobriz- 
 hoffer reports that they would knock at his door 
 at night, and, when asked who was there, would 
 not answer for fear of letting their names be 
 known to any evilly-disposed listener. A like 
 motive probably explains the reluctance of which 
 Gregor speaks in his Folk-Lore of the North- 
 East of Scotland^ when ' folk calling at a house 
 of the better class on business with the master 
 or mistress had a very strong dislike to tell 
 their names to the servant who admitted them." 1 1 
 While these sheets are passing through the press, 
 my friend Mr. W. B. Yeats hands me a letter 
 from an Irish correspondent, who tells of a fairy- 
 haunted old woman living in King's County. 
 Her tormentors, whom she calls the ' Fairy Band 
 1 P. 30. 
 
84 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 of Shinrone, 1 come from Tipperary. They pelt 
 her with invisible missiles, hurl abuse at her, 
 and rail against her family, both the dead and 
 the living, until she is driven well-nigh mad. 
 And all this spite is manifested because they 
 cannot find out her name, for if they could learn 
 that, she would be in their power. Sometimes 
 sarcasm or chaff is employed, and a nickname 
 is given her to entrap her into telling her real 
 name, all which she freely talks about, often 
 with fits of laughter. But the fairies trouble 
 her most at night, coming in through the wall 
 over her bed-head, which is no laughing matter ; 
 and then, being a good Protestant, she recites 
 chapters and verses from the Bible to charm 
 them away. And although she has been thus 
 plagued for years, she still holds her own 
 against the 'band of Shinrone." Speaking 
 in general terms on this name-concealment 
 custom, Captain Bourke says that 'the name 
 of an American Indian is a sacred thing, 
 never to be divulged by the owner himself 
 without due consideration. One may ask a 
 warrior of any tribe to give his name, and 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 85 
 
 the question will be met with either a point- 
 blank refusal, or the more diplomatic evasion 
 that he cannot understand what is wanted of 
 him. The moment a friend approaches, the 
 warrior first will whisper what is wanted, and 
 the friend can tell the name, receiving a re- 
 ciprocation of the courtesy from the inquirer/ 1 
 Grinnell says that ' many Blackfeet change their 
 names every season. Whenever a Blackfoot 
 counts a new coup (i.e. some deed of bravery), he 
 is entitled to a new name, 1 in the same way that 
 among ourselves a successful general or admiral 
 sinks his name when raised to the peerage. ' A 
 Blackfoot will never tell his name if he can avoid 
 it, in the belief that if he should reveal it, he 
 would be unlucky in all his undertakings/ 2 The 
 warriors of the Plains Tribes ' used to assume 
 agnomens or battle-names, and I have known 
 some of them who had enjoyed as many as four or 
 five ; but the Apache name, once conferred, seems 
 to remain through life, except in the case of the 
 medicine-men, who, I have always suspected, 
 
 1 John G. Bourke, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, p. 461 
 (Washington, 1892). 2 Blackfoot Lodge Tales, p. 194. 
 
86 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 change their names on assuming their profession, 
 much as a professor of learning in China is said 
 to do,' 1 and, it may be added, as among high 
 dignitaries of the church, members of ecclesiastical 
 orders, and so forth. But of this more presently. 
 The foregoing reference to names of warriors 
 permits the inclusion of a story told by Fraser 
 in his Tour to the Himalayas.' 2 ' In one of the 
 despatches intercepted during our war with 
 Nepaul, Gooree Sah had sent orders to 'find 
 out the name of the commander of the British 
 army ; write it upon a piece of paper : take it 
 and some rice and turmeric ; say the great incan- 
 tation three times ; having said it, send for some 
 plum-tree wood, and therewith burn it. 1 There is 
 a story in the annals of British conquest in India 
 to the effect that General Lake took a city with 
 surprisingly little resistance, because his name 
 signified in the native language ' Crocodile,' and 
 there was an oracle that the city would be 
 captured by that reptile. Phonetic confusion 
 explains the honours paid to Commissioner 
 Gubbins by the natives of Oude ; Govinda being 
 
 1 Bourke, p. 462. 2 P. 530. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 87 
 
 the favourite name of Krishna, the popular 
 incarnation of Vishnu. 1 
 
 Mr. J. H. Collens, in his Guide to Trinidad, 
 published in 1887, tells the following story : 
 
 A doctor in a remote district had one day 
 assembled a number of negro children for vaccina- 
 tion. In the course of his duties he came to a 
 little girl, when the following conversation ensued 
 with the mother : 
 
 DOCTOR. Are you the child's mother ? 
 
 WOMAN. Yes, sir is me darter. 
 
 D. And what is your name ? 
 
 W. Is me name ? 
 
 D. (rather impatiently). Yes; I asked you 
 what is your name ? 
 
 W. (hesitatingly). Dey does caal me Sal. 
 
 D. Well ; Sal what ? 
 
 W. (assuringly, but with a suspicious side-glance 
 at a neighbour who is intently taking all in). Dey 
 does allus caal me Sal. 
 
 D. (getting desperate). Oh, botheration ! will 
 you tell me your proper name or not ? 
 
 W. (with much reluctance approaching the 
 doctor, whispers in the lowest possible tone of 
 voice). Delphine Segard. 
 
 D. (with intense disgust). Then why couldn't 
 you say so ? 
 
 Mr. Collens remarks that his 'medical friend 
 
 1 For these two illustrations I am indebted to my friend Mr. 
 W. K. Morfill, Reader in Russian, University of Oxford. 
 
88 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 now bears these little passages with more 
 equanimity, for he has gained experience, and 
 knows that the reason why the woman was so 
 reluctant to utter her name aloud was that she 
 believed she had an enemy in the room who 
 would take advantage of the circumstance if 
 she got hold of her true name, and would work 
 her all manner of harm. It is a fact that these 
 people (the negro population of Trinidad) some- 
 times actually forget the names of their near 
 relations from hearing and using them so little.' 
 
 With this group of examples chosen from 
 widely sundered sources, and with the ever- 
 growing evidence of continuity of old ideas 
 lurking in the veriest trifles, it may not be so 
 far-fetched as at first sight it seems, to detect 
 traces of the avoidance-superstition in the game- 
 rhyme familiar to our childhood : 
 
 ' What is your name ? 
 Pudding and tame. 
 If you ask me again I '11 tell you the same/ 
 
 Ellis says, ' It appears strange that the birth- 
 name only, and not an alias, should be believed 
 capable of carrying some of the personality of 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 89 
 
 the bearer elsewhere, since the latter preserves 
 the subjective connection just as well as the real 
 name. But the native view seems to be that 
 the alias does not really belong to the man." 
 This view, which is universal through every stage 
 of culture, takes practical effect from the time 
 that the child is born and made the subject of 
 name-giving ceremonies. In civilised communi- 
 ties, the c baptismal name is the real name, the 
 name registered in heaven,' and this belief is an 
 integral part of the general body of customs 
 which have for their object the protection of 
 the infant from maleficent agents at the critical 
 period of birth. 'The ancients,' says Aubrey, 
 ' had a solemne time of giving names, the 
 equivalent to our christening. 1 1 Barbaric, Pagan, 
 and Christian folk-lore is full of examples of the 
 importance of naming and other birth-ceremonies, 
 in the belief that the child's life is at the mercy 
 of evil spirits watching the chance of casting 
 spells upon it, of demons covetous to possess it, 
 and of fairies eager to steal it, and leave a 
 'changeling 1 in its place. This last-named 
 1 Eemaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, p. 40. 
 
90 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 superstition as to theft of the newly born by the 
 'little folk ' is availed of as subject of humorous 
 incident by the writer of the old mystery play 
 of the ' Shepherds ' (Secunda Pastorum\ in the 
 Towneley Collection. 1 While all the hinds 
 except Mak have fallen asleep, he steals home 
 with a sheep, which he pops into the cradle, 
 telling his wife to feign lying-in. Then he 
 returns to his mates, and, shamming sleep, says 
 that they have roused him from a dream that 
 his wife has given birth to a ' yong lad,' and so 
 makes excuse to hasten to her. When he is 
 gone, the sheep is missed, whereupon the shep- 
 herds follow Mak home, and are bidden to 
 c speke soft ? because of the * seke woman. 1 They 
 are thus put off guard, but on leaving, one of 
 them remembers that no gift had been made to 
 the child, so they return for that kindly office. 
 Despite Mak's entreaties not to disturb the sleep 
 of the ' lyttle day starne,' they ' lyft up the 
 clowtt,' and discover strange likeness between 
 the babe and the ' shepe." Both Mak and his 
 
 1 Surtees Society, 183G. (Re-issued by the English Dialect 
 Society, 1898.) 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 91 
 
 wife declare this metamorphosis to be the 
 maliceful work of fairies, the woman saying that 
 
 the boy 
 
 ' Was takyn with an elfe. 
 I saw it myself 
 When the clok stroke twelf 
 Was he forshapyn ' (transformed). 
 
 ' The hour of midnight," says Brand, ' was looked 
 on by our forefathers as the season when this 
 species of sorcery was generally performed.' 
 
 In Ireland the belief in changelings is as strong 
 as it was in pre-Christian times ; both there and 
 in Scotland the child is carefully watched till 
 the rite of baptism is performed, fishermen's nets 
 being sometimes spread over the curtain open- 
 ings to prevent the infant being carried off; 
 while in West Sussex it is considered unlucky to 
 divulge a child's intended name before baptism. 1 
 This reminds us of the incident in the Moray 
 story, Nicht Nought Nothing, in which the queen 
 would not christen the bairn till the king came 
 back, saying, ' We will j ust call him Nicht 
 Nought Nothing until his father comes home.'' 2 
 
 1 Henderson, Folk-Lore of Northern Counties, pp. 15, GG ; 
 Gregor, Folk-Lore of North-East Scotland, p. 11. 
 
 2 Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 89. 
 
92 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 Brand says that among Danish women precaution 
 against evil spirits took the form of putting 
 garlick, bread, salt, or some steel instrument as 
 amulets about the house before laying the new- 
 born babe in the cradle. 1 Henderson 2 says that 
 in Scotland ' the little one's safeguard is held to 
 lie in the placing of some article of clothing 
 belonging to the father near the cradle,' while in 
 South China a pair of the father's trousers are 
 put near the bedstead, and a word-charm pinned 
 to them, so that all evil influences may pass into 
 them instead of harming the babe, 3 and in New 
 Britain a charm is always hung in the house to 
 secure the child from like peril. 4 In Ruthenia 
 it is believed that if a wizard knows a man's 
 baptismal name he can transform him by a mere 
 effort of will. Parkyns says that it is the custom 
 in Abyssinia ' to conceal the real name by which 
 a person is baptized, and to call him only by a 
 sort of nickname which his mother gives him on 
 leaving the church. The baptismal names in 
 
 1 Vol. ii. p. 143. 
 
 2 Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, p. 14. 
 
 3 Dennys, Folk-Lore of China, p. 13. 
 
 4 Journal, Anthrop. Institute, 1889, p. 293. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 93 
 
 Abyssinia are those of saints, such as Son of 
 St. George, Slave of the Virgin, Daughter of 
 Moses, etc. Those given by the mother are 
 generally expressive of maternal vanity regarding 
 the appearance or anticipated merits of the 
 child. The reason for the concealment of the 
 Christian name is that the Bouda cannot harm 
 a person whose real name he does not know. 1 
 Should he, however, have learned the true name 
 of his victim, he adopts a method of which 
 illustrations have been given in the references 
 to sympathetic magic. ' He takes a particular 
 kind of straw, and muttering something over it 
 bends it into a circle, and places it under a stone 
 The person thus doomed is taken ill at the very 
 moment of the bending of the straw, and should 
 it by accident snap under the operation, the 
 result of the attack will be the death of the 
 patient. 1 1 Parkyns adds that in Abyssinia all 
 blacksmiths are looked upon as wizards or 
 Boudas. Among the many characters in which 
 the devil appears is that of Wayland the Smith, 
 the northern Vulcan, but perhaps the repute 
 
 1 Life in Abyssinia, vol. ii. p. 145. 
 
94 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 attaching to the Boudas has no connection with 
 that conception, and may be an example of the 
 barbaric belief in the magic power of iron to 
 which allusion has been made. They are credited 
 with the faculty of being able to turn themselves 
 into hyaenas and other wild beasts, so that few 
 people will venture to molest or offend a black- 
 smith. ' In all church services in Abyssinia, par- 
 ticularly in prayers for the dead, the baptismal 
 name must be used. How they manage to hide 
 it I did not learn ; possibly by confiding it only 
 to the priest." l Mr. Theodore Bent says that it 
 is a custom in the Cyclades to call a child Iron 
 or Dragon or some other such name before 
 christening takes place, the object being to 
 frighten away the evil spirits. Travelling east- 
 wards, we find the Hindu belief that when a 
 child is born an invisible spirit is born with it, 
 and unless the mother keeps one breast tied up 
 for forty days, while she feeds the child with the 
 other (in which case the spirit dies of hunger) 
 the child grows up with the endowment of the 
 
 1 William Simpson, 'An Artist's Jottings in Abyssinia,' 
 Words, 1868, p. 607. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 95 
 
 evil eye. 1 Two names are given at birth, one 
 secret and used only for ceremonial purposes, and 
 the other for ordinary use. The witch, if she 
 learns the real name, can work her evil charms 
 through it. Hence arises the use of many con- 
 tractions and perversions of the real name, and 
 many of the nicknames which are generally given 
 to children. 2 Among the Algonquin tribes 
 children are usually named by the old woman of 
 the family, often with reference to some dream ; 
 but this real name is kept mysteriously secret, and 
 what commonly passes for it is a mere nickname, 
 such as Little Fox ' or Red Head.' 3 School- 
 craft says that the true name of the famous 
 Pocahontas, ' La Belle Sauvage,' whose pleadings 
 saved the life of the heroic Virginian leader, John 
 Smith, was Matokes. ' This was concealed from 
 the English in a superstitious fear of hurt by 
 them if her name was known/ 
 
 It is well known that in Roman Catholic 
 countries the name-day wholly supersedes the 
 birthday in importance ; and, as the foregoing 
 
 1 W. Crooke, Folk-Lore of North- West India, vol. ii. p. 2. 
 
 2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 5. 
 
 8 Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 142. 
 
96 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 examples testify, the significance attached to the 
 name brings into play a number of causes operat- 
 ing in the selection, causes grouped round belief 
 in omens, and in meanings to be attached to 
 certain events, of which astrology is a world- wide 
 interpreter. 
 
 Among the Red Indians ' the giving of names 
 to children is a solemn matter, and one in which 
 the medicine-man should always be consulted. 
 The Plains Tribes named their children at the 
 moment of piercing their ears, which should 
 occur at the first sun-dance after their birth, or, 
 rather, as near their first year as possible.' l At 
 the birth of every Singhalese baby its horoscope 
 is cast by an astrologer; and so highly is the 
 document esteemed, that even in the hour of 
 death more reliance is placed upon it than on the 
 symptoms of the patient ! Again, the astrologer 
 is called in to preside at the baby's ' rice-feast/ 
 when some grains of rice are first placed in its 
 mouth. He selects for the little one a name 
 which is compounded from the name of the ruling 
 planet of that moment. This name he tells only 
 1 Bourke, p. 461. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 97 
 
 to the father, who whispers it low in the baby's 
 ear ; no one else must know it, and, like the 
 Chinese 'infantile name,' this 'rice-name' is 
 never used lest sorcerers should hear it and be 
 able to work malignant spells. 1 
 
 In every department of human thought evi- 
 dence of the non-persistence of primitive ideas is 
 the exception rather than the rule. Scratch the 
 epiderm of the civilised man, and the barbarian 
 is found in the derm. In proof of which, there 
 are more people who believe in Zadkiel's Vox 
 Stellarum than in the Nautical Almanac-, and 
 rare are the households where the Book of 
 Dreams and Fortune-Teller are not to be found 
 in the kitchen. The Singhalese caster of nativi- 
 ties has many representatives in the West, and 
 there may lie profit in the reminder of the 
 shallow depth to which knowledge of the orderly 
 sequence of things has yet penetrated in the 
 many. Societies and serials for the promulga- 
 tion of astrology exist and flourish among us ; 
 Zadkiel boasts his circulation of a hundred thou- 
 
 1 Miss Gordon Gumming, Two Happy Years in Ceylon, vol. i. 
 pp. 278, 279. 
 
98 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 sand, and vaunts the fulfilment of his Delphic 
 prophecies ; while the late Astronomer-Royal, Sir 
 George Airy, was pestered, as his successor pro- 
 bably is, with requests to work the planets, 
 accompanied by silver wherewith to cross his 
 expert palm. There lies before me a book, 
 entitled Kabalistic Astrology, in which, darkened 
 by pages of pseudo-philosophic jargon, a theory 
 is formulated on ' the power of Names and 
 Numbers/ ' all names being essentially numbers, 1 
 and vice versti. A name is a mantram, an in- 
 vocation, a spell, a charm. It gains its efficacy 
 from the fact that, in pronunciation, certain 
 vibrations, corresponding to the mass-chord of the 
 name, are set up ; not only in the atmosphere, but 
 also in the more ethereal substance, referred to 
 by a modern philosopher as " mind-stuff," whose 
 modifications form the basis of changes of 
 thought. This is evident to us in the fact that 
 names import to our minds certain characteristics, 
 more or less definite according to the acuteness 
 of our psychometric sense. How different, for 
 example, are the impressions conveyed to us in 
 the names " Percy," Horatio," " Ralph," " Eva," 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 99 
 
 and "Ruth." Seeing then this difference, it 
 will not seem wholly improbable that a difference 
 of fortune and destiny should go along with 
 them. 1 1 The evidence of astrological logic which 
 this last sentence affords is on a par with what 
 follows throughout the fatuous volume. All 
 names are numbers, and each letter in the name 
 has its numerical and astral value by which can be 
 known what planets were in the ascendant at the 
 time of birth of the person whose horoscope is 
 being cast. Such is the stuff that still 'leads 
 captive silly' folk. The old astrology had a 
 certain quality of nobleness about it. As Comte 
 has justly said, it was an attempt to frame a 
 philosophy of history by reducing the seemingly 
 capricious character of human actions within the 
 domain of law. It strove to establish a connec- 
 tion between these actions and the motions of 
 the heavenly bodies which were deified by the 
 ancients and credited with personal will directing 
 the destiny of man. But the new astrology is 
 the vulgarest travesty of the old. 
 
 1 Kdbalistic Astrology, or Your Fortune in Your Name. By 
 Sepharial. (The Astrological Publishing Association, London.) 
 
100 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 While among the Mordvins of the Caucasus 
 and other peoples accident or whim determines the 
 child's name, among the Tshi-speaking tribes of 
 West Africa this is given at the moment of birth 
 and derived from the day of the week when that 
 event happens. After being washed, charms are 
 bound round the child to avert evil. 1 Throughout 
 Australia the custom of deriving the name from 
 some slight circumstance prevails. 'Like the 
 nomadic Arabs and the Kaffirs, a sign is looked for, 
 and the appearance of a kangaroo or an emu at 
 the time of birth, or the occurrence of that event 
 near some particular spot, or under the shelter 
 of a tree, decides the infant's name. This name 
 is not the one by which a man will be known in 
 after life. Another is given him on his initiation 
 to rank in the tribe ; and, if his career should 
 be marked by any striking event, he will then 
 receive a fitting designation, and his old name 
 will be perhaps forgotten. Or, if he has had con- 
 ferred on him, on arriving at manhood, a name 
 similar to that of any one who dies, it is changed 
 by his tribe." 2 With this may be compared the 
 
 1 Ellis, p. 332, 2 Brough Smyth, vol. i. p. xxi. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 101 
 
 Aino abstention from giving the name of either 
 parent to the child, because, when they are dead, 
 they are not to be 'mentioned without tears,' 1 and 
 also the feeling in the North of England against 
 perpetuating a favourite baptismal name when 
 death has snatched away its first bearer. 2 c The 
 clan of the Manlii at Rome avoided giving the 
 name of Marcus to any son born in the clan. 
 We may infer from this that the possession of 
 the name was once thought to be bound up with 
 evil consequences,' and this notwithstanding the 
 legend that the name-avoidance was due to 
 Marius Manlius who proved himself the saviour 
 of the city when the clamouring of geese aroused 
 the garrison of the Capitol to a scaling attack 
 by the Gauls being afterwards put to death for 
 plotting to found a monarchy. 3 
 
 The custom of name-giving from some event 
 has frequent reference in the Old Testament, as, 
 for example, in Genesis xxx. 11, where Leah's 
 maid gives birth to a son; 'And she said, A troop 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Journal, vol. vi. p. 49. 
 
 2 Dcnham Tracts, vol. ii. p. 49. 
 
 3 Grainger, Worship of the Romans, p. 249. 
 
102 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 cometh, and she called his name Gad.' So 
 Rachel, dying in childbed, calls the babe Ben-oni, 
 6 son of sorrow,' but the father changes his name 
 to Ben-jamin, ' son of the right hand.' The 
 Nez Perces obtain their names in several ways, 
 one of the more curious being the sending of a 
 child in his tenth or twelfth year to the moun- 
 tains, where he fasts and watches for something 
 to appear to him in a dream and give him a 
 name. On the success or failure of the vision 
 which the empty stomach is designed to secure, 
 his fortunes are believed to depend. No one ques- 
 tions him on his return, the matter being regarded 
 as sacred, and only years hence, when he may 
 have done something to be proud of, will he reveal 
 his name to trusted friends. Of course, through- 
 out his life he is known to his fellow-tribesmen 
 by some nickname. 1 The Maoris had an in- 
 teresting baptismal or lustration ceremony, dur- 
 ing which the priest repeated a long list of 
 ancestral names. When the child sneezed, the 
 name which was then being uttered was chosen, 
 and the priest, as he pronounced it, sprinkled the 
 
 1 American Society Folk-Lore Journal, vol. iv. p. 329. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 103 
 
 child with a small branch ' of the karamu which 
 was stuck upright in the water. 1 * 
 
 In East Central Africa the birth-name is 
 changed when the initiatory rites are performed, 
 after which it must never be mentioned. Mr. 
 Duff-Macdonald says that it is a terrible way 
 of teasing a Wayao to point to a little boy and 
 ask if he remembers what was his name when he 
 was about the size of that boy. 2 Miss Mary 
 Kingsley confirms these reports of the silence 
 and secrecy on the part of the initiated ; and in 
 an unpublished manuscript on the customs in 
 Loango, which came into my hands, Mr. Dennett 
 makes the interesting and significant statement 
 that on the initiation of a youth into the tribal 
 mysteries when he reaches manhood, he lies 
 down in his forest retreat as if dead, and on 
 rising takes a new name. Here we seem scarcely 
 a step removed from the ritual of the Roman 
 Catholic Church, when the Miserere is chanted, 
 and a pall flung over the nun who takes the veil 
 and effaces her old self under another name. 
 
 1 Taylor, Te Ika a Maori, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 
 p. 185. 2 Africana, vol. i. p. 128. 
 
104 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 In fact, these correspondences bring us face to 
 face with the large question of the origin of the 
 rites and ceremonies of civilised faiths which 
 show no essential difference in character from 
 those in practice among barbaric races ; rites 
 and ceremonies gathering round the chief events, 
 as birth, maturity, marriage, and death. Those 
 who contend, for example, that the ordinance of 
 baptism in the Christian Church is of divine 
 authority, thus possessing warrant which makes 
 it wholly a thing apart from the lustrations 
 and naming-customs which are so prominent a 
 feature of barbaric life, will not be at pains 
 to compare the one with the other. If they 
 do, it will be rather to assume that the lower 
 is a travesty of the higher, in the spirit of 
 the Roman Catholic missionaries, who on see- 
 ing the tonsured Buddhist monks with all 
 the apparatus of rosaries, bells, holy water, 
 and relics, believed that the devil, as arch- 
 deceiver, had tempted these ecclesiastics to 
 dress themselves in the clothes of Christians, 
 and mock their solemn rites. The majority of 
 Christendom still attaches enormous importance 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 105 
 
 to infant baptism, 1 an importance which is 
 shared, for less precise reasons, by rustics, who 
 believe that 'children never thrive till they're 
 christened," 2 and that the night air thrills to 
 the cry of the homeless souls of the unbaptized. 
 That superstitions of this order should be ram- 
 pant among the unlettered, evidences their pagan 
 origin rather than the infiltration of sacerdotal 
 theories of baptismal regeneration and of the 
 doom of the un christened. But between the 
 believers in these theories, and those who see in 
 the ritual of the higher religions the persistence 
 of barbaric ideas, there will be agreement when 
 the poles meet the equator. The explanation 
 which the evolutionist has to give falls into line 
 with what is known and demonstrated about 
 the arrest of human development by the innate 
 conservatism aroused when doubt disturbs the 
 settled order of things. Rites, like their dis- 
 pensers, may change their name, but not their 
 
 1 ' How can your boy sing acceptable hymns to God in His 
 Church if he has not been baptized ? ' recently asked the vicar of 
 a parish in Suffolk when the boy's mother expressed a wish that 
 he should join the choir. 
 
 2 Henderson, p. 14. 
 
106 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 nature, and in the ceremonies of civil 1 and 
 religious society we find no inventions, only 
 survivals more or less elaborated. The low 
 intellectual environment of man's barbaric past 
 was constant in his history for thousands of 
 years, and his adaptation thereto was complete. 
 The intrusion of the scientific method in its 
 application to man's whole nature disturbed that 
 equilibrium. But this, as yet, only within the 
 narrow area of the highest culture. Like the 
 lower life-forms that constitute the teeming 
 majority of organisms, and that have undergone 
 little, if any, change during millions of years, 
 the vaster number of mankind have remained 
 but slightly, if at all, modified. The keynote 
 of evolution is adaptation, not continuous 
 development, and this is illustrated, both 
 physically and mentally, by man. Therefore, 
 
 1 There appears to be no ground for assuming a survival of the 
 avoidance-superstition in the threat of the Speaker of the House 
 of Commons to 'name' a recalcitrant member. Sir Frederick 
 Pollock says, in a letter to me: 'It cannot be older than the 
 etiquette of not usually calling members by their proper names 
 in debate, and I suspect that is not very old. There was a great 
 deal of innovating and recasting in forms and ceremonies in the 
 last quarter of the seventeenth century or so, and I should not 
 wonder if it began then ; but this is a mere guess.' 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 107 
 
 the superstitions that still dominate human life, 
 even in so-called civilised centres and 'high 
 places,' are no stumbling-blocks to the student 
 of history. He accounts for their persistence, 
 and the road of inquiry is cleared. Man being 
 a unit, not a duality, thought and feeling are, 
 in the last resort, in harmony, as are the ele- 
 ments that make up the universe which includes 
 him. But the exercise of feeling has been active 
 from the beginning of his history, while thought, 
 speaking comparatively, has but recently had 
 free play. So far as its influence on the modern 
 world goes, and this with long periods of arrest 
 between, we may say that it began, at least in 
 the domain of scientific naturalism, with the 
 Ionian philosophers, twenty-four centuries ago. 
 And these are but as a day in the passage of 
 prehistoric ages. In other words, man wondered 
 long chiliads before he reasoned, because feeling 
 travels along the line of least resistance, while 
 thought, or the challenge by inquiry, with its 
 assumption that there may be two sides to a 
 question, must pursue a path obstructed by the 
 dominance of taboo and custom, by the force of 
 
108 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 imitation, and by the strength of prejudice, 
 passion, and fear. 4 It is not error, 1 Turgot 
 wrote, in a saying that every champion of a 
 new idea should have ever in letters of flame 
 before his eyes, ' which opposes the progress of 
 truth ; it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of 
 routine, everything that favours inaction. 1 1 
 
 In these causes lies the explanation of the 
 persistence of the primitive ; the causes of the 
 general conservatism of human nature, 
 
 ( Born into life, in vain., 
 Opinions, those or these, 
 Uualter'd to retain, 
 The obstinate mind decrees,' 2 
 
 as in the striking illustration cited in Heine's 
 Travel-Pictures. ( A few years ago Bullock dug 
 up an ancient stone idol in Mexico, and the next 
 day he found that it had been crowned during 
 the night with flowers. And yet the Spaniard 
 had exterminated the old Mexican religion with 
 fire and sword, and for three centuries had been 
 engaged in ploughing and harrowing their minds 
 and implanting the seed of Christianity.' 3 
 
 1 John Morley, Miscellanies, vol. ii. p. 77. 
 
 2 Matthew Arnold, Empcdocles on Etna. 
 
 3 Eng. trans, by F. Storr, p. 10(i. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 109 
 
 The causes of error and delusion, and of the 
 spiritual nightmares of olden time, being made 
 clear, there is begotten a generous sympathy 
 with that which empirical notions of human 
 nature attributed to wilfulness or to man's fall 
 from a high estate. For superstitions which 
 are the outcome of ignorance can only awaken 
 pity. Where the corrective of knowledge is 
 absent, we see that it could not be otherwise. 
 And thereby we learn that the art of life largely 
 consists in that control of the emotions, and that 
 diversion of them into wholesome channels, which 
 the intellect, braced with the latest knowledge 
 and with freedom in the application of it, can 
 alone effect. 
 
 These remarks have direct bearing on the 
 inferences to be drawn from the examples 
 gathered from barbaric and civilised sources. 
 For those examples fail in their intent if they 
 do not indicate the working of the law of con- 
 tinuity in the spiritual as in the material sphere. 
 Barbaric birth and baptism customs, and the 
 importance attached to the name with accom- 
 panying invocation and other ceremonies, ex- 
 
110 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 plain without need of import of other reasons, 
 the existence of similar practices, impelled by 
 similar ideas, in civilised society. The priest who 
 christens the child ' in the Name of the Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost ' is the lineal descendant, 
 the true apostolic successor, of the medicine-man. 
 He may deny the spiritual father who begat him, 
 and vaunt his descent from St. Peter. But the 
 first Bishop of Rome, granting that title to the 
 apostle, was himself a parvenu compared to the 
 barbaric priest who uttered his incantations on 
 the hill now crowned by the Vatican. The story 
 of the beginnings of his order in a prehistoric 
 past is a sealed book to the priest. For, in East 
 and West alike, his studies have run between 
 the narrow historical lines enclosing only such 
 material as is interpreted to support the prepos- 
 terous claims to the divine origin of his office 
 which the multitude have neither the courage to 
 challenge nor the knowledge to refute. Did 
 those studies run on the broad lines laid down 
 by anthropology, the sacerdotal upholders of 
 those claims would be compelled to abandon 
 their pretensions and thus sign the death -warrant 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 111 
 
 of their caste. The modern sacerdotalist repre- 
 sents in the ceremony of baptism the barbaric 
 belief in the virtue of water as in some way 
 equally difficult to both medicine-man and priest 
 to define a vehicle of supernatural efficacy. 
 In the oldest fragment of Hebrew song the stream 
 is addressed as a living being, 1 and the high 
 authority of the late Professor Robertson Smith 
 may be cited for the statement that the Semitic 
 peoples, to whom water, especially flowing water, 
 was the deepest object of reverence and worship, 
 regarded it not merely as the dwelling-place of 
 spirits, but as itself a living organism. That has 
 been the barbaric idea about it everywhere ; and 
 little wonder. For the primitive mind associates 
 life with motion ; 2 and if in rolling stone and 
 waving branch it sees not merely the home and 
 haunt of spirit, but spirit itself, how much more 
 
 1 Then Israel sang this song : Spring up, O well, sing ye unto 
 it. Numbers xxi. 17. 
 
 2 The Indian does not see any sharp line of distinction, such as 
 we see, between man and other animals, between one kind of 
 animal and another, or between animals man included and 
 inanimate objects. On the contrary, to the Indian all objects, 
 animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except 
 that they differ in the accident of bodily form. Every object in 
 the whole world is a being, consisting of a body and spirit, and 
 
112 MAGIC THROUGH 
 
 so in tumbling cataract, swirling rapid, and toss- 
 ing sea, swallowing or rejecting alike the victim 
 and the offering. Birthplace of life itself, and 
 ever life's necessity; mysterious fluid endowed 
 with cleansing and healing qualities, the feeling 
 that invests it can only be refined, it cannot 
 perish. And we therefore think with sympathy 
 of that ' divine honour ' which Gildas tells us our 
 forefathers ' paid to wells and streams ' ; of the 
 food-bringing rivers which, in the old Celtic 
 faith, were ' mothers ' ; of the eddy in which the 
 water-demon lurked ; of the lakes ruled by lonely 
 queens ; of the nymphs who were the presiding 
 genii of wells. Happily, the Church treated 
 this old phase of nature-worship tenderly, adapt- 
 ing what it could not abolish, substituting the 
 name of Madonna or saint for the pagan pre- 
 siding deity of the spring. Most reasonable, 
 therefore, is the contention that the barbaric 
 lustrations re-appear in the rite at Christian 
 
 differs from every other object in no respect except that of bodily 
 form, and in the greater or less degree of brute power and brute 
 cunning consequent on the difference of bodily form and bodily 
 habits. Our next step, therefore, is to note that animals, other 
 than men, and even inanimate objects, have spirits which dillVr 
 not at all in kind from those of men. Everard Im Tlumi, 
 Among the Indians of (fiiiaim, p. 350. 
 
INTANGIBLE THINGS 113 
 
 fonts ; that the brush of the pagan temple 
 sprinkles the faithful with holy water, as it 
 still sprinkles with benediction the horses in 
 the Polio or prize races at Siena; 1 and that 
 the leprous Naaman repairing to the Jordan, 
 together with the sick waiting their turn on 
 the margin of Bethesda, have their correspond- 
 ences in the children dipped in wells to be 
 cured of rickets, in the dragging of lunatics 
 through deep water to restore their reason, and 
 in the cripples who travel by railway to bathe 
 their limbs in the well of St. Winifred in Flint- 
 shire. The influence which pagan symbolism 
 had on Christian art and doctrine has interesting 
 illustration in a mosaic of the sixth century at 
 Ravenna, representing the baptism of Jesus. 
 The water flows from an inverted urn, held by 
 a venerable figure typifying the river-god of the 
 Jordan, with reeds growing beside his head, and 
 snakes coiling round it. 
 
 1 W. W. Story gives a graphic account of these races, as also 
 of the annual blessing and sprinkling of animals on the feast- 
 day of St. Antonio, their protecting saint, in Roba di Roma, pp. 
 454 /. 
 
viii 
 
 TABOO 
 
 TABOO is the dread tyrant of savage life. 
 Among civilised peoples, under the guise of cus- 
 toms whose force is stronger than law, it rules in 
 larger degree than most persons care to admit. 
 But among barbaric communities it puts a ring 
 fence round the simplest acts, regulates all inter- 
 course by the minutest codes, and secures obedience 
 to its manifold prohibitions by threats of punish- 
 ment to be inflicted by magic and other apparatus 
 of the invisible. It is the Inquisition of the 
 lower culture, only more terrible and effective than 
 the infamous ' Holy Office." Nowhere, perhaps, 
 does it exert more constant sway than in the series 
 of customs which prohibit (a) persons related in 
 certain degrees by blood or marriage from ad- 
 dressing one another by name, or from oven 
 looking at one another, and which further pro- 
 
 114 
 
 
TABOO 115 
 
 hibit (b) the utterance of the names of indi- 
 viduals of high rank, as priests and kings, as 
 also (c) of the dead, and (d) of gods and spiritual 
 beings generally. 
 
 (a) TABOO BETWEEN RELATIVES 
 
 Among the Central Australians a man may 
 not marry or speak to his mother-in-law. He 
 may speak to his mother at all times, but not to 
 his sister if she be younger than himself. A 
 father may not speak to his daughter after she 
 becomes a woman. 1 The name of his father-in- 
 law is taboo to the Dyak of Borneo, and among 
 the Omahas of North America the father- and 
 mother-in-law do not speak to their son-in-law 
 or mention his name. 2 The names of mothers- 
 in-law are never uttered by the Apache, and it 
 would be very improper to ask for them by 
 name. 3 In the Bougainville Straits the men 
 would only utter the names of their wives in a 
 low tone, as though it was not the proper thing 
 
 1 Horn's Expedition to Central Australia. Report on Anthro- 
 pology, p. 166. 
 
 2 Long, Expedition, vol. i. p. 253. 3 Bourke, p. 461. 
 
116 TABOO 
 
 to speak of women by name to others. 1 In East 
 Africa, among the Barea, the wife never utters 
 the name of her husband, or eats in his presence ; 
 and even among the Beni Amer, where the women 
 have extensive privileges and great social power, 
 the wife is still not allowed to eat in the hus- 
 band's presence, and mentions his name only 
 before strangers. 2 In the Banks Islands the 
 rules as to avoidance are very minute. ' A man 
 who sits and talks with his wife's father will not 
 mention his name, much less the name of his 
 mother-in-law ; and the like applies to the wife, 
 who, further, will on no account name her 
 daughter's husband.' 3 But these prohibitions 
 are not found in all the Melanesian islands. 
 Among the Sioux or Dacotas the father- or 
 mother-in-law must not call their sons-in-law by 
 name, and vice versa ; while the Indians east of 
 the Rockies regard it as indecent for either 
 fathers- or mothers-in-law to look at, or speak to, 
 their sons- or daughters-in-law. It was considered 
 a gross breach of propriety among the Blackfoot 
 
 1 Guppy, The Solomon Islands, p. 47. 
 
 2 Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 143. 
 
 3 Codrington, The Melanesians and their Anthropology, |>. II 
 
TABOO 117 
 
 tribe for a man to meet his mother-in-law ; and if 
 by any mischance he did so, or, what was worse, 
 if he spoke to her, she demanded a heavy pay- 
 ment which he was compelled to make. 1 In 
 New Britain a man must under no circumstances 
 speak to his mother-in-law; he must go miles 
 out of his way not to meet her, and the penalty 
 for breaking an oath is to be forced to shake 
 hands with her. 2 In some parts of Australia 
 the mother-in-law does not allow the son-in-law 
 to see her, but hides herself at his approach, or 
 covers herself with her clothes if she has to pass 
 him. Even Pund-jel, the Australian Creator of 
 all things, has a wife whose face he has never seen. 3 
 Sometimes circumlocutory phrases are used, al- 
 though, as will be seen presently, these are more 
 usually applied to supernatural beings. For 
 example, among the Amazulu the woman must 
 not call her husband by name ; therefore, when 
 speaking of him, she will say, ' Father of So-and- 
 so,' meaning one of her children. As the Hindu 
 wife is never, under any circumstances, to men- 
 
 1 Grinnell, p. 195. 
 
 2 Romilly, Western Pacific and New Guinea, 
 
 3 Brough Smyth, vol. i. p. 423. 
 
118 TABOO 
 
 tion her husband's name, she calls him ' He,' 
 'The Master," 'Swamy,' etc. An old-fashioned 
 Midland cottager's wife rarely speaks of her 
 husband by name, the pronoun 'he, 1 supplemented 
 by ' my man,' or ' my master,' is sufficient distinc- 
 tion. Gregor says that ' in Buckie there are 
 certain family names that fishermen will not 
 pronounce,' the folk in the village of Coull 
 speaking of 'spitting out the bad name.' If 
 such a name be mentioned in their hearing, they 
 spit, or, in the vernacular, ' chiff,' and the man 
 who bears the dreaded name is called a 'chif- 
 feroot.' When occasion to speak of him arises, 
 a circumlocutory phrase is used, as ' The man it 
 diz so in so,' or ' The laad it lives at such and 
 such a place.' As further showing how barbaric 
 ideas persist in the heart of civilisation, there is 
 an overwhelming feeling against hiring men 
 bearing the reprobated names as hands for the 
 boats in the herring fishing season ; and when 
 they have been hired before their names were 
 known, their wages have been refused if the 
 season has been a failure. ' Ye hinna hid sic a 
 fishin' this year is ye hid the last,' said a woman 
 
TABOO 119 
 
 to the daughter of a famous fisher. ' Na, na ! 
 faht wye cud we ? We wiz in a chifferoofs 
 'oose, we cudnae hae a fushinY In some of the 
 villages on the east coast of Aberdeenshire it 
 was accounted unlucky to meet any one of the 
 name of Whyte when going to sea. Lives would 
 be lost, or the catch of fish would be poor. 1 In 
 the ' Story of Tangalimbibo ' 2 the heroine speaks 
 of things done ( knowingly by people whose 
 names may not be mentioned ' ; upon which Mr. 
 Theal remarks, ' no Kaffir woman may pronounce 
 the names of any of her husband's male relatives 
 in the ascending line; she may not even pro- 
 nounce any word in which the principal syllable 
 of his name occurs.' 3 Some further examples of 
 this extension of the general superstition to parts 
 of the name will be given further on when dealing 
 with higher principalities and powers. Mean- 
 while, the curious set of avoidance-customs just 
 illustrated naturally prompt inquiry as to their 
 origin. Upon this little, if any, light can be 
 thrown. The relation of these customs to the 
 
 1 Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland, pp. 200, 201. 
 
 2 Kaffir Folk-Lore, p. 58. 3 Ibid. p. 202. 
 
120 TABOO 
 
 general system of taboo is obvious, but what 
 motive prompted this particular, and to us 
 whimsical, code of etiquette, remains a problem 
 not the less difficult of solution in the face of the 
 wide distribution of the custom. Long before 
 any systematic inquiry into social usages was set 
 afoot, and before any importance was attached 
 to the folk-tale as holding primitive ideas in 
 solution, the taboo-incident was familiar in 
 stories of which 4 Cupid and Psyche,' and the 
 more popular ' Beauty and the Beast,' are types. 
 The man and woman must not see each other, or 
 call each other by name ; or, as in the Welsh and 
 other forms of the story (see p. 25), the bride 
 must not be touched with iron. But the prohi- 
 bition is broken ; curiosity, in revolt, from Eden 
 onwards, against restraint, disobeys, and the 
 unlucky wax drops on the cheek of the fair one, 
 who thenceforth disappears. From Timbuctoo 
 and North America, from Australia and Poly- 
 nesia, and from places much nearer home than 
 these, travellers have collected evidence of the 
 existence of the custom on which the fate of 
 many a wedded pair in fact and fiction has 
 
TABOO 121 
 
 hinged. Herodotus gives us a gossipy story on 
 this matter, which is of some value. He says 
 that some of the old Ionian colonists brought no 
 women with them, but took wives of the women 
 of the Carians, whose fathers they had slain. 
 Therefore the women made a law to themselves, 
 and handed it down to their daughters, that they 
 should never sit at meat with their husbands, and 
 that none should call her husband by name. 1 
 Disregarding the explanation of the formulating 
 of social codes by women bereaved of husbands 
 and lovers, which Herodotus, assuming this to be 
 an isolated case, appears to suggest, we find in the 
 reference to the abducting of the Carians an illus- 
 tration of the ancient practice of obtaining wives 
 by forcible capture, and the consequent involun- 
 tary mingling of people of alien race and speech. 
 That, however, carries us but a little, if any, way 
 towards explaining the avoidance-customs, the 
 origin of which remains a perplexing problem. 
 In an important paper on the ' Development of 
 Institutions applied to Marriage and Descent, 1 2 
 
 1 I. 146. 
 
 2 Journal of Anthrop. Institute, vol. xviii. pp. 245-269. 
 
122 TABOO 
 
 Professor Tylor formulated an ingenious method, 
 the pursuit of which may help us toward a solu- 
 tion. He shows that the custom cannot arise 
 from local idiosyncrasies, because in cataloguing 
 some three hundred and fifty peoples he finds it 
 in vogue among sixty-six peoples widely distri- 
 buted over the globe ; that is, he finds forty-five 
 examples of avoidance between the husband and 
 his wife's relations; thirteen examples between 
 the wife and her husband's relations ; and eight 
 examples of mutual avoidance. The schedules 
 also show a relation between the avoidance- 
 customs and 'the customs of the world as to 
 residence after marriage.' Among the three 
 hundred and fifty peoples the husband goes to 
 live with his wife's family in sixty-five instances, 
 while there are one hundred and forty-one cases 
 in which the wife takes up her abode with her 
 husband's family. Thus there is a well-marked 
 preponderance indicating that ceremonial avoid- 
 ance by the husband is in some way connected 
 with his living with his wife's family, and vice 
 versa as to the wife and the husband's family. 
 The reason of this connection 'readily presents 
 
TABOO 123 
 
 itself, inasmuch as the ceremony of not speaking 
 to and pretending not to see some well-known 
 person close by, is familiar enough to ourselves 
 in the social rite which we call " cutting." This 
 indeed with us implies aversion, and the implica- 
 tion comes out even more strongly in objection 
 to utter the name ("we never mention her," as 
 the song has it)." 1 It is different, however, in the 
 barbaric custom, for here the husband is none the 
 less on friendly terms with his wife's people because 
 they may not take any notice of one another. 
 As the husband has intruded himself among a 
 family which is not his own, and into a house 
 where he has no right, it seems not difficult to 
 understand their marking the difference between 
 him and themselves by treating him formally as 
 a stranger. John Tanner, the adopted Ojibwa, 
 describes his being taken by a friendly Assineboin 
 into his lodge, and seeing how at his companion's 
 entry the old father- and mother-in-law covered 
 up their heads in their blankets till their son-in- 
 law got into the compartment reserved for him, 
 where his wife brought him his food. So like is 
 the working of the human mind in all stages of 
 
124 TABOO 
 
 civilisation that our own language conveys in 
 a familiar idiom the train of thought which 
 governed the behaviour of the parents of the 
 Assineboin's wife. We have only to say that 
 they do not recognise their son-in-law, and we 
 shall have condensed the whole proceeding into a 
 single word. A seemingly allied custom is that 
 of naming the father after the child, this being 
 found among peoples practising avoidance-cus- 
 toms, where a status is given to the husband 
 only on the birth of the first child. The naming 
 of him as father of ' So-and-so ' is a recognition 
 of paternity, and also a recognition of him by 
 the wife's kinsfolk. 
 
 To refer to these strange and unexplained 
 customs is to bring home the salutary fact that 
 perchance we may never get at the back of many 
 a seeming vagary of social life. Human institu- 
 tions, like man himself, are of vast antiquity, and 
 to project ourselves into the conditions under 
 which some of them arose is not possible. But 
 at least we can avoid darkening the obscure by 
 'multiplying words without knowledge/ 
 
TABOO 125 
 
 Euphemisms and Name-Changes 
 Persons and things cannot remain nameless, 
 and avoidance of one set of names compels 
 the use of others. Hence ingenuity comes into 
 play to devise substitutes, roundabout phrases, 
 euphemisms, and the like. Many motives are at 
 work in the selection, (i) Both dead and living 
 things are often given complimentary names in 
 ' good omen words,' as the Cantonese call them, in 
 place of names that it is believed will grate or 
 annoy, such mode of flattery being employed to 
 ward off possible mischief, and also through fear 
 of arousing jealousy or spite in maleficent spirits, 
 (n) Names are also changed with the object of 
 confusing or deceiving the agents of disease, and 
 even death itself, (in) Certain rites, notably 
 that of blood-brotherhood, are accompanied by 
 exchange of names or adoption of new names ; 
 while in near connection with this is the sub- 
 stitution of new names for birth-names at the 
 initiation ceremonies to which reference has been 
 made. 
 
 (i) The flattering and cajoling words in 
 
126 TABOO 
 
 which barbaric man addresses the animals he 
 desires to propitiate, or designs to kill, are due 
 to belief in their kinship with him, and in the 
 transmigration of souls which makes the beast 
 a possible embodiment of some ancestor or of 
 another animal. Hence the homage paid to it 
 while the man stands ready to spear or shoot it. 
 Throughout the northern part of Eurasia, the 
 bear has been a chief object of worship, and 
 apologetic and propitiatory ceremonies accom- 
 pany the slaying of him for food. The Ainos of 
 Yezo and the Gilyaks of Eastern Siberia beg his 
 pardon and worship his dead body, hanging up 
 his skull on a tree as a charm against evil spirits. 
 Swedes, Lapps, Finns, and Esthonians apply the 
 tenderest and most coaxing terms to him. The 
 Swedes and Lapps avert his wrath by calling him 
 the ' old man ' and 'grandfather' ; the Esthonians 
 speak of him as the ' broad-footed,^ but it is among 
 the Finns that we find the most euphemistic 
 names applied to him. The forty-sixth rune of 
 the Kalevala has for its theme the capture and 
 killing of the ' sacred Otso, 1 who is also addressed 
 as the ' honey-eater, 1 the c fur-robed, 1 the * forest 
 
TABOO 127 
 
 apple,' who gives his life 'a sacrifice to North- 
 land.' When he is slain, Wainamoinen, the old 
 magician-hero of the story, sings the birth and 
 fate of Otso, and artfully strives to make the 
 dead grizzly believe that no cruel hand killed 
 him, but that he fell 
 
 'From the fir-tree where he slumbered, 
 Tore his breast upon the branches. 
 Freely gave his life to others.' 
 
 Thorpe says that in Swedish popular belief 
 there are certain animals which should not at 
 any time be spoken of by their proper names, 
 but always with kind allusions. ' If any one 
 speaks slightingly to a cat, or beats her, her 
 name must not be uttered, for she belongs to 
 the hellish crew, and is intimate with the Berg- 
 troll in the mountains, where she often goes. In 
 speaking of the cuckoo, the owl, and the magpie, 
 great caution is necessary, lest one should be 
 ensnared, as they are birds of sorcery. Such 
 birds, also snakes, one ought not to kill without 
 cause, lest their death be avenged ; l and, in like 
 
 1 Northern Mythology, vol. ii. pp. 83, 84 ; Lloyd, Scandinavian 
 Adventures, vol. i. p. 475. 
 
128 TABOO 
 
 manner, Mohammedan women dare not call a 
 snake by its name lest it bite them." 1 The Swedes 
 fear to tread on a toad, because it may be an 
 enchanted princess. The fox is called ( blue-foot," 
 or ' he that goes in the forest ' ; among the 
 Esthonians he is ' grey-coat ' ; and in Mecklen- 
 burg, for twelve days after Christmas, he goes by 
 the name ' long-tail/ In ! Sweden the seal is 
 ' brother Lars,' and throughout Scandinavia the 
 superstitions about wolves are numerous. In 
 some districts during a portion of the spring 
 the peasants dare not call that animal by his 
 usual name, Varg, lest he carry off the cattle, 
 so they substitute the names Ulf, Grahans, or 
 ' gold-foot,' because in olden days, when dumb 
 creatures spoke, the wolf said : 
 
 ' If tliou callest me Varg, I will be wroth with thee, 
 But if thou callest me of gold, I will be kind to thee.' 
 
 The Claddagh folk of Galway would not go 
 out to fish if they saw a fox, 1 and the name is 
 as unlucky as the thing. Hence Livonian fisher- 
 men (and the same superstition is prevalent from 
 Ireland to Italy) fear to endanger the success of 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 98. 
 
TABOO 129 
 
 their nets by calling certain animals, as the hare, 
 pig, dog, and so forth, by their common names ; 
 while the Esthonians fear to mention the hare 
 lest their crops of flax should fail. In Annam 
 the tiger is called ' grandfather ' or ' lord ' ; and 
 both in Northern Asia and Sumatra the same 
 device of using some bamboozling name is adopted. 
 ' Among the Jews the taboo had great force, for 
 they were forbidden to have leaven in their 
 houses during the Passover, and they abstained 
 from even using the word. Being forbidden 
 swine's flesh, they avoid the word pig altogether, 
 and call that animal dabchar acheer, " the other 
 thing." In Canton the porpoise or river-pig is 
 looked upon as a creature of ill-omen, and on 
 that account its name is tabooed. 1 * 
 
 The desire not to offend, to ' let sleeping dogs 
 lie," as we say, explains why the Hindus call 
 Siva, their god of destruction, the ' gracious one,' 
 and why a like euphemism was used by the 
 Greeks when speaking of the Furies as the 
 Eumenides. Similarly, both Greek and Galway 
 peasants call the fairies 'the others,' while the 
 
 1 Rev. Hilderic Friend, Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 77. 
 I 
 
130 TABOO 
 
 natives of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Mr. 
 Louis Becke tells me, speak of the spirits as 
 ' they,' ' those, 1 or ' the thing. 1 With sly humour, 
 not unmixed with respect for the ' quality,' the 
 Irish speak of the tribes of the goddess Danu as 
 'the gentry'; in Sligo we hear of the 'royal 
 gentry ' ; in Glamorganshire the fairies are called 
 the ' mother's blessing.' If the fays are the 
 ' good people,' the witches are ' good dames,' and 
 their gatherings ' the sport of the good company.' 
 It is a Swedish belief that if one speaks of the 
 troll-pack or witch-crew, and names fire and 
 water, or the church to which one goes (this last 
 condition is probably post-Christian), no harm 
 can arise. 1 ' Even inanimate things,' Thorpe 
 adds, ' are not at all times to be called by their 
 usual names ' ; fire, for example, is on some occa- 
 sions not to be called eld or ett, but hetta (heat) ; 
 water used for brewing, not vatu, but lag or Zo?/, 
 otherwise the beer would not be so good. 
 
 The dread that praises or soft phrases may 
 call the attention of the ever- watchful maleficent 
 spirits to the person thus favoured, causing the 
 
 1 Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 84, 
 
TABOO 131 
 
 evil eye to cast its baleful spell, or black magic 
 to do its fell work, has given rise to manifold 
 precautions. In modern Greece any allusion to 
 the beauty or strength of the child is avoided ; 
 and if such words slip out, they are at once 
 atoned for by one of the traditional expiatory 
 formulas. 1 The world-wide belief in the invisible 
 powers as, in the main, keen to pounce on mortals, 
 explains the Chinese custom of giving their boys 
 a girl's name to deceive the gods; sometimes 
 tabooing names altogether, and calling the child 
 ' little pig ' or 6 little dog/ In India, especially 
 when several male children have died in the 
 family, boys are dressed as girls to avert further 
 misfortune : sometimes a nose-ring is added as 
 further device. Pausanias tells the story of the 
 young Achilles wearing female attire and living 
 among maidens, 2 and to this day the peasants 
 of Achill Island (on the north-west coast of 
 Ireland) dress their boys as girls till they are 
 about fourteen years old to deceive the boy- 
 seeking devil. In the west of Ireland some 
 
 1 Rennell Rodd, Customs and Lore of Modern Greece, p. 111. 
 
 2 I. 22, 6. 
 
132 TABOO 
 
 phrase invocative of blessing should be used on 
 entering a cottage, or meeting a peasant, or 
 saluting a child, because this shows that one has 
 no connection with the fairies, and will not bring 
 bad luck. ' Any one who did not give the usual 
 expressions, as Mamdeud, " God save you " ; 
 Slaunter, "your good health"; and Boluary, "God 
 bless the work," was looked on with suspicion." : 
 A well-mannered Turk will not pay a compliment 
 without uttering { Mashallah ' ; an Italian will 
 not receive one without saying the protective 
 ' Grazia a Deo ' ; and the English peasant- woman 
 has her ' Lord be wi 1 us ' ready when flattering 
 words are said about her babe. In each case the 
 good power is invoked as protector against the 
 dangers of fascination and other forms of the 
 black art. 2 
 
 A survival of this feeling exists in the modern 
 housewife's notion, that if she comments on the 
 luck attaching to some household god, ' pride 
 goes before a fall.' She may have exulted over 
 the years in which a favourite china service has 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 112. 
 
 2 Elworthy, The Evil Eye, p. 32. 
 
TABOO 133 
 
 remained intact, and the next day, as she reaches 
 down some of the pieces, the memory of her 
 vaunting causes the hand to tremble, and the 
 precious ware is smashed to atoms on the floor. 
 It has been often remarked that if any mishaps 
 attend a ship on her first voyage, they follow her 
 ever after. The probable explanation is that the 
 knowledge of the accident befalling her induces 
 an anxious feeling on the part of those respon- 
 sible for her safety, which often unnerves them in 
 a crisis, and brings about the very calamity which 
 they fear, and which under ordinary conditions 
 could be averted. 
 
 Among the Hindus, when a parent has lost 
 a child by disease, which, as is usually the case, 
 can be attributed to fascination or other de- 
 moniacal influence, it is a common practice to 
 call the next baby by some opprobrious name, 
 with the intention of so depreciating it that it 
 may be regarded as worthless, and so protected 
 from the evil eye of the envious. Thus a male 
 child is called Kuriya, or ' dunghill ' ; Khadheran 
 or Ghasita, ' He that has been dragged along the 
 ground ' ; Dukhi or Dukhita, ' The afflicted one ' ; 
 
134 TABOO 
 
 Phatingua, ' grasshopper ' ; Jhingura, c cricket ' ; 
 Bhikra or Bhikhu, ' beggar ' ; Gharib, c poor ' ; 
 and so on. So a girl is called Andhri, ' blind ' ; 
 Tinkouriya or Chhahkauriya, ' She that was sold 
 for three or six cowry shells ' ; Dhuriya, ' dusty ' ; 
 Machhiya, ' fly," 1 and so on. All this is connected 
 with what the Scots call c fore-speaking, 1 when 
 praise beyond measure, praise accompanied with 
 a sort of amazement or envy, is considered likely 
 to be followed by disease or accident. 1 In keep- 
 ing with this is the story of the pessimist invalid 
 who, admitting himself better to-day, added that 
 he would not be so well to-morrow ! 
 
 (n) In barbaric belief both disease and death 
 are due to maleficent agents, any theory of 
 natural causes being foreign to the savage mind ; 
 hence euphemisms to avert the evil. The Dyaks 
 of Borneo call the smallpox 'chief or 'jungle 
 leaves," or say, ' Has he left you ? ' 2 while the 
 Cantonese speak of this ' Attila of the host of 
 diseases ' as ' heavenly flower ' or ' good intention," 
 and deify it as a goddess. The Greeks call it 
 
 1 Crooke, vol. ii. p. 4. 
 
 - Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 145. 
 
TABOO 135 
 
 or 'she that must be named with 
 respect. 1 'Similarly, the Chinese deem ague to 
 be produced by a ghost or spirit, and for fear 
 of offending him they will not speak of that 
 disease under its proper name.* 1 1 De Quincey has 
 remarked on the avoidance of all mention of 
 death as a common euphemism ; and of this China 
 is full of examples. In the Book of Rites it is 
 called ' the great sickness," 1 and when a man dies, 
 le is said to have ' entered the measure,' certain 
 :erms being also applied in the case of certain 
 oersons. For example, the Emperor's death is 
 called pang, 6 the mountain has fallen ' ; when a 
 scholar dies he is pat luk, ' without salary or 
 emolument.'' 'Coffins' are tabooed under the 
 term ' longevity boards.' 2 Mr. Giles says that 
 ' boards of old age,' and ' clothes of okl age sold 
 here,' are common shop-signs in every Chinese 
 city ; death and burial being always, if possible, 
 spoken of euphemistically in some such terms as 
 these. 3 
 
 The belief that spirits know folks by their 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 78. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 80. 
 
 3 Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, vol. i. p. 102. 
 
136 TABOO 
 
 names further explains the barbaric attitude 
 towards disease and death. In Borneo the name 
 of a sick child is changed so as to confuse or 
 deceive the spirit of the disease ; the Lapps 
 change a child's baptismal name if it falls ill, 
 and rebaptize it at every illness, as if they 
 thought to bamboozle the spirit by this simple 
 stratagem of an alias. 1 When the life of s 
 Kwapa Indian is supposed to be in dangei 
 from illness, he at once seeks to get rid of his 
 name, and sends to another member of the tribe 
 who goes to the chief and buys a new name, 
 which is given to the patient. With the abandon- 
 ment of the old name it is believed that the sick- 
 ness is thrown off. ' On the reception of the 
 new name the patient becomes related to the 
 Kwapa who purchased it. Any Kwapa can 
 change or abandon his personal name four times, 
 but it is considered bad luck to attempt such 
 a thing for the fifth time.' 2 The Rabbis recom- 
 mended the giving secretly of a new name, as a 
 means of new life, to him who is in danger of 
 
 1 Farrer, p. 120. 
 
 2 American Folk- Lore Journal, vol. viii. ]>. 1 :>;'>. 
 
TABOO 137 
 
 dying. 1 The Rev. Hilderic Friend vouches for 
 the genuineness of the following story, the bear- 
 ing of which on the continuity of barbaric and 
 quasi-civilised ideas is significant : ' In the village 
 
 of S , near Hastings, there lived a couple who 
 
 had named their first-born girl Helen. The child 
 sickened and died, and when another daughter 
 was born, she was named after her dead sister. 
 But she also died, and on the birth of a third 
 daughter the cherished name was repeated. This 
 third Helen died, " and no wonder," the neigh- 
 bours said ; " it was because the parents had used 
 the first child^s name for the others." About 
 the same time a neighbour had a daughter, who 
 was named Marian because of her likeness to a 
 dead sister. She showed signs of weakness soon 
 after birth, and all said that she would die as 
 the three Helens had died, because the name 
 Marian ought not to have been used. It was 
 therefore tabooed, and the girl was called Maude. 
 She grew to womanhood, and was married ; but 
 so completely had her baptismal name of Marian 
 been shunned, that she was married under the 
 
 1 Trumbull, The Blood Covenant, p. 337. 
 
138 TABOO 
 
 name of Maude, and by it continues to be known 
 to this day." 1 
 
 The Chinooks changed their names when a near 
 relative died, in the belief that the spirits would 
 be attracted back to earth if they heard familiar 
 names. The Lenguas of Brazil changed their 
 names on the death of any one, for they believed 
 that the dead knew the names of all whom they 
 had left behind, and might return to look for 
 them : hence they changed their names, hoping 
 that if the dead came back they could not find 
 them. 2 Although the belief, that if the dead be 
 named their ghosts will appear, is found in this 
 crude form only among barbaric folk, there is, in 
 this attitude towards the unseen, no qualitative 
 difference between savage and civilised man. 
 Wherever there prevail anthropomorphic ideas 
 about the Deity, i.e. conception of Him as a 
 ' non-natural, magnified man,'' to use Matthew 
 Arnold's phrase, there necessarily follows the 
 assumption that the relations between God and 
 man are, essentially, like in character to those 
 subsisting between human beings. The majority 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 79. 2 Dorman, p. 154. 
 
TABOO 139 
 
 of civilised mankind have no doubt that God 
 knows each one of them and all their belongings 
 by name, as He is recorded to have known men 
 of olden time, addressing them direct or through 
 angels by their names, and sometimes altering 
 these. Take for example : ' Neither shall thy 
 name any more be called Abram, but thy name 
 shall be Abraham, for a father of many nations 
 have I made thee ' (Genesis xvii. 5). ' And he 
 said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, 
 but Israel, for as a prince hast thou power with 
 God and with men, and hast prevailed ' (ibid. 
 xxxii. 28). ' And the Lord said unto Moses, 
 I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken ; 
 for thou hast found grace in My sight, and I 
 know thee by name' (Exodus xxxiii. 17). 
 
 Miscellaneous as are the contents of the Old 
 and New Testaments, the relations between the 
 several parts of which have arisen, in many 
 instances, through the arbitrary decisions of suc- 
 cessive framers of the canon, the belief in the 
 efficacy of names, and in their integral connection 
 with things, runs through the Bible, because that 
 belief is involved in the unscientific theories of 
 
140 TABOO 
 
 phenomena which are present in all ancient 
 literatures. Man may soar into the abstract, 
 but he has to live in the concrete. When he 
 descends from hazy altitudes to confront the 
 forms in which he envisages his ideas, he finds 
 what slight advance he has made upon primitive 
 conceptions. The God of the current theology 
 is no nameless Being, and one of the prominent 
 members of the spiritual hierarchy is that Record- 
 ing Angel who writes the names of redeemed 
 mortals in the Book of Life. Amidst all the 
 vagueness which attaches itself to conceptions of 
 another world, there is the feeling that the names 
 of the departed are essential to their identification 
 when they enter the unseen, and to their recog- 
 nition by those who will follow them. Civilised 
 and savage are here on the same intellectual 
 plane. 
 
 To name the invisible is to invoke its pre- 
 sence or the manifestation of its power. The 
 Norse witches tied up wind and foul matter in 
 a bag, and then, undoing the knot, shouted 
 ' Wind, in the devil's name, 1 when the hurricane 
 swept over land and sea; the witch's dance 
 
TABOO 141 
 
 could be stopped, and the dancers dispersed, 
 by uttering the name of God or Christ ; and the 
 like idea is expressed in the phrase, ' Talk of the 
 devil, and you '11 see his horns.' 
 
 (in) In Grimm's story of the 'Goose Girl,' 
 when the old queen's daughter starts for the 
 kingdom of her betrothed, her mother gives her 
 costly trinkets, cups and jewels of gold, and, 
 taking a handkerchief, cuts her own finger till it 
 bleeds, letting three drops of blood fall on the 
 handkerchief. This she gives to the princess, 
 bidding her preserve it, because she will need it 
 on the way. After she and her waiting-maid 
 had ridden some miles, a great thirst fell upon 
 her, and she bade the girl dismount to fill the 
 golden cup with water from a stream hard by. 
 But the girl refused, whereupon the princess 
 alighted to slake her thirst, using only her hands, 
 because the girl would not let her have the cup. 
 As she drank she sighed, and the three drops of 
 blood said, 6 If thy mother knew this, her heart 
 would break.' The princess mounted her horse, 
 but had not gone far before her thirst returned ; 
 
142 TABOO 
 
 again the maid refused to serve her, and again 
 she alighted to drink. But this time, as she 
 stooped to the stream, her handkerchief fell out 
 of her bosom, and was carried away by the 
 current. Thenceforth her strength left her, and 
 the maid had her wholly in her power. She 
 made the princess exchange clothes and horses, 
 and then, when the palace was reached, forbade 
 her entrance, while she, pretending to be the 
 expected bride, went in, and was embraced by 
 the prince. Of course, as usual in fiction, all 
 came right in the end ; but we are not further 
 concerned with the fortunes of the persons, the 
 story, one of a group of kindred folk-tales, being 
 cited only to show how the main incident revolves 
 on the barbaric belief in the efficacy of blood. 
 
 In the early stages of society, blood-relationship 
 is the sole tie that unites men into tribal com- 
 munities. As Sir Henry Maine has observed, 'there 
 was no brotherhood recognised by our savage fore- 
 fathers except actual consanguinity regarded as 
 a fact. If a man was not of kin to another, there 
 was nothing between them. He was an enemy to 
 be slain or spoiled or hated, as much as the wild 
 
TABOO 143 
 
 beasts upon which the tribes made war, as belong- 
 ing indeed to the craftiest and the cruelest order 
 of white animals. It would scarcely be too strong 
 an assertion that the dogs which followed the 
 camp had more in common with it than the 
 tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe.' 1 
 And although enlarged knowledge, in unison with 
 growing recognition of mutual rights and obliga- 
 tions, has extended the feeling of community, an 
 unprejudiced outlook on the world does not 
 warrant the hope that the old tribal feeling has 
 passed the limits of race. Human nature being 
 what it is, charged with the manifold forces of 
 self-assertion and aggression bequeathed by a 
 stormy and struggling past, the various nation- 
 alities, basing their claims and their unity on the 
 theory of blood-relationship, do their best to 
 dispel the dream of the unity of all mankind. 
 
 As already observed, the importance and 
 sanctity attached to blood explain the existence 
 of a large number of rites connected with cove- 
 nants between man and his fellows, and between 
 man and his gods ; covenants sealed by the drink - 
 
 1 Early History of Institutions, p. 65. 
 
144 TABOO 
 
 ing, or interfusing, or offering of blood. Any 
 full account of these rites, notably on their sacri- 
 ficial side, would need a volume, but here reference 
 is again made to them in connection with the 
 exchange of names, or with the bestowal of new 
 names, which sometimes accompanies them. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer remarks, that ' by absorb- 
 ing each other's blood, men are supposed to 
 establish actual community of nature ' ; and as it 
 is a widely diffused belief that the name is vitally 
 connected with its owner, ' to exchange names is 
 to establish some participation in one another's 
 being.' 1 Hence the blending is regarded as more 
 complete when exchange of name goes with the 
 mingling of blood, making even more obligatory 
 the rendering of services between those who are 
 no longer aliens to each other. When Tolo, a 
 Shastikan chief, made a treaty with Colonel 
 M 4 Kee, an American officer, as to certain con- 
 cessions, he desired some ceremony of brotherhood 
 to make the covenant binding, and, after some 
 parleying, proposed an exchange of names, which 
 was agreed to. Thenceforth he became M'Kee, 
 
 1 Principles of Sociology, part ii. ]>. '21. 
 
TABOO 145 
 
 and M'Kee became Tolo. But after a while the 
 Indian found that the American was shuffling 
 over the bargain, whereupon 6 M'Kee angrily cast 
 off that name, and refused to resume that of Tolo.'' 
 He would not answer to either, and to the day of 
 his death insisted that his name, and, therefore, 
 his identity, was lost. 1 There is no small pathos 
 in this revolt of the rude moral sense of the 
 Indian against the white man's trickery, and in 
 the utter muddle of his mind as to who and what 
 he had become. 
 
 The custom of name-exchanging existed in the 
 West Indies at the time of Columbus ; and in the 
 South Seas, Captain Cook and a native, named 
 Oree, made the exchange, whereby Cook became 
 Oree and the native became Cookee. ' But Cad- 
 wallader Colden's account of his new name is 
 admirable evidence of what there is in a name to 
 the mind of the savage. " The first time I was 
 among the Mohawks I had this compliment from 
 one of their old Sachems, which he did by giving 
 me his own name, Cayenderongue. He had been 
 
 1 Quoted by Dr. Trumbull from Powers' ' Tribes of California, 
 in Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. iii. p. 247. 
 
14-6 TABOO 
 
 a notable warrior, and he told me that now I had 
 a right to assume all the acts of valour he had 
 performed, and that now my name would echo 
 from hill to hill over all the Five Nations? When 
 Golden went back into the same part ten or 
 twelve years later, he found that he was still 
 known by the name he had thus received, and 
 that the old chief had taken another." 1 
 
 In the manhood-initiation rites of the native 
 Australians a long series of ceremonies is followed 
 by the conferring of a new name on the youth, 
 and the sponsor, who may be said to correspond 
 to a godfather among ourselves, opens a vein in 
 his own arm, and the lad then drinks the warm 
 blood. A curious addition to the New South 
 Wales ritual consists in the giving of a white 
 stone or quartz crystal, called mundie, to the 
 novitiate in manhood when he receives his new 
 name. ' This stone is counted a gift from deity, 
 and is held peculiarly sacred. A test of the 
 young man's moral stamina is made by the old 
 men trying, by all sorts of persuasion, to induce 
 
 1 Tylor, Earl}/ History of Mankincl; p. 128, quoting from 
 Oolden's History of the Five Indian Nations of Con<n{<>, pail i. 
 p. 10 (1747). 
 
TABOO 147 
 
 him to surrender this possession when first he has 
 received it. This accompaniment of a new name 
 is worn concealed in the hair, tied up in a packet, 
 and is never shown to the women, who are for- 
 bidden to look at it under pain of death. 1 * 
 
 (b) TABOO ON NAMES OF KINGS AND PRIESTS 
 
 Avoidance and veneration superstitions gather 
 force with the ascending rank of individuals. The 
 divinity that ' doth hedge ' both king and priest, 
 which two offices were originally blended in one 
 man, increases the power of the taboo. Until 
 Mr. Frazer published his Golden Bough, the sig- 
 nificance of this taboo, as applied to royal and 
 sacerdotal persons, was somewhat obscure. But 
 the large, indeed overcrowding, array of examples 
 which his industry has collected and his ingenuity 
 interpreted, make it clear that the priest-king 
 was regarded as the incarnation of supernatural 
 powers on whose unhindered and effective working 
 the welfare of men depended. That being the 
 belief, obviously the utmost care was used to pro- 
 
 1 Trumbull, pp. 336, 337. 
 
148 TABOO 
 
 tect in every possible way the individual in whom 
 those powers were incarnated. As the Golden 
 Bough does not come under the head of popular 
 books in the sense of being widely read, although, 
 within a limited circle, often quoted, it may be 
 well to explain this barbaric theory of the spirit 
 indwelling in man by citing the typical example 
 which Mr. Frazer has chosen, and which gives its 
 title to his book. 
 
 Three miles from Aricia, an old town on the 
 Alban Hills, a few miles from Rome, there was a 
 famous grove and temple dedicated to Diana. 
 The temple was on the northern shore of the lake 
 under the cliffs on which the modern village of 
 Nemi stands. The priest of that temple, which was 
 held in high repute throughout Italy, was called 
 Rex Nemorensis, or ' King of the Grove," 1 and, at 
 least in later times, he was always a runaway 
 slave. The strangest feature of the business was 
 that he must be a murderer, because he could 
 obtain the priestly office only by killing the man 
 who held it, and, therefore, when he had secured 
 it, he had to be always on the alert against being 
 attacked. Lord Macaulay, in his poem of the 
 
TABOO 149 
 
 ' Battle of Lake Regillus ' (Lays of Ancient Rome), 
 refers to this curious custom : 
 
 ' From the still, glassy lake tliat sleeps 
 Beneath Aricia's trees 
 Those trees in whose dim shadow 
 The ghostly priest doth reign. 
 The priest who slew the slayer, 
 And shall himself be slain.' 
 
 This priest-king kept special guard over a 
 sacred tree, and if any runaway slave could 
 succeed in breaking- off a branch from it, the 
 priest was compelled to fight him in single com- 
 bat. The existence of this custom within his- 
 torical times is proved by the circumstance that 
 the Emperor Caligula gave orders that the Rex 
 Nemorensis, who during his reign had long been 
 left unassailed, should be attacked and killed. 
 But its origin and reason had then become for- 
 gotten, and it is only in our time that its con- 
 nection with the groups of rites and ceremonies 
 gathering round certain phases of nature- worship, 
 notably tree-worship, has been established. In 
 the general application of the barbaric concep- 
 tion of life indwelling in all things, and especially 
 active where motion was apparent, and where 
 
150 TABOO 
 
 growth, maturity, and decline marked the object, 
 the tree was believed to be the abode of a spirit, 
 while the priest was regarded as an incarnation 
 of the tree-spirit on which the fruitfulness of the 
 soil depended. We have seen how universal is 
 the barbaric belief in real and vital connection 
 between one living thing and another, and 
 also between one non-living thing and another ; 
 and it is therein that the key is found to the 
 belief that if the Rex Nemorensis was suffered to 
 live on until he became decrepit by age, then 
 the earth would become old and feeble also, 
 the trees yielding no fruit and the fields no 
 harvest. Therefore, to prevent this, the priest- 
 king, as an incarnated god, was not allowed to 
 reach old age ; and when his waning strength was 
 proved by his inability to hold his own against 
 the aggressor, he was killed, and the divine spirit, 
 with its power and vigour unimpaired, was 
 believed to pass into his slayer and successor. 
 The sacred tree, it may be added, from which the 
 runaway slave sought to break off the 4 Golden 
 Bough" the parasitic mistletoe, Mr. Frazer 
 suggests was probably an oak, the worship 
 
TABOO 151 
 
 of which was general among the Aryan-speaking 
 peoples of Europe. Tradition averred that the 
 fateful branch which ^Eneas plucked at the 
 sibyl's bidding, before he essayed the perilous 
 journey to the underworld, was the Golden 
 Bough. 
 
 Incarnate gods are common enough in rude 
 society, the incarnation being sometimes tem- 
 porary, and sometimes permanent. The Can- 
 tonese apply the expressive term ' god boxes ' to 
 priests in whom the gods are believed to dwell 
 from time to time; but in seeking for correspond- 
 ences to the Rex Nemorensis, we find corro- 
 borative examples in old-world traditions, and 
 among savage races of to-day. Among the 
 former, we have those relating to the Mikado, 
 who, although now somewhat shorn of his ancient 
 glory, and stripped of the mystery that invested 
 him, was regarded as an incarnation of the 
 sun, all the gods repairing once every year to 
 spend a month at his court. He was required 
 to take rigorous care of his person, and ' to do 
 such things as, examined according to the custom 
 of other nations, would be thought ridiculous 
 
152 TABOO 
 
 and impertinent.' Like the high pontiff of the 
 Zapotecs in South Mexico, his feet must never 
 touch the ground ; the sun must never shine on 
 his naked head ; he was required to sit motionless 
 all the day so that tranquillity might be assured 
 to his empire ; and such holiness was ascribed to 
 all the parts of his body, that ' he dare not cut 
 off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails.' 
 But ' that he might not grow too dirty, he was 
 washed in his sleep, because a theft at such time 
 did not prejudice his holiness or dignity.' l The 
 pots in which his food was cooked and served 
 were destroyed lest they should fall into lay 
 hands; his clothes were fatal to those who 
 touched them for taboo is extended from the 
 tabooed person to the things he wears, or tastes, 
 or handles, even to the objects on which he looks, 
 as illustrated by the Samoan high priest and 
 prophet Tupai. ' His very glance was poison. 
 If he looked at a coco-nut tree it died, and if 
 he glanced at a bread-fruit tree it also withered 
 away.' 2 In Tahiti, if a chief's foot touches the 
 
 1 Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 110. 
 
 2 Rev. G. Turner, Samoa, p. '-'.". 
 
TABOO 153 
 
 earth, the spot which it touches becomes taboo 
 thenceforth, and none may approach it ; chiefs 
 are therefore carried in Tahiti when they go out. 
 If he enters a house it becomes taboo ; and 
 in ancient Greece the priest and priestess of 
 Artemis Hymnia amongst the Orchomenians, 1 
 and the Rechabites among the Jews, might not 
 enter a private house, 'for the same reason as 
 the Polynesian chief, 5 as Dr. Jevons correctly 
 suggests. 2 As with the Caesars, the Pharaohs 
 were deified in their lifetime, and their daily 
 routine was regulated after the fashion of the 
 Mikado, while they too were held blamable if 
 the crops failed. 
 
 Returning to Rome, we find the Flamen Dialis, 
 who was consecrated to the service of Jupiter, 
 and who, therefore, was probably the incarnated 
 sky-spirit, tied and bound by rules governing the 
 minutest details of his life. He might not ride 
 or even touch a horse, nor see an army under 
 arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor 
 
 1 ' Neither their washings nor their ways of life in general are 
 like those of common folk, nor do they enter the house of a 
 private man,' Pausanias, viii. 13; cf. Jeremiah, xxxv. 9. 
 
 2 Introduction to History of Religion, p. 02. 
 
154 TABOO 
 
 have a knot in any part of his garments ; no fire 
 except a sacred fire might be taken out of his 
 house ; he might not touch wheaten flour or 
 leavened bread ; he might not touch or even 
 name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans, and ivy ; 
 he might not walk under a vine ; the feet of his 
 bed had to be daubed with mud, and iron was 
 put at the head of it as a charm against evil 
 spirits ; his hair could be cut only by a free man 
 and with a bronze knife, and his hair and nails, 
 when cut, had to be buried under a lucky tree ; 
 he might not touch a dead body, nor enter a 
 place where one was burned ; he might not see 
 work being done on holy days ; he might not be 
 uncovered ' or annoint himselfe ' 1 in the open air ; 
 if a man in bonds were taken into his house he 
 had to be unbound, and the cords had to be drawn 
 up through a hole in the roof, and so let down 
 into the street. His wife, the Flaminica, had 
 to observe nearly the same rules, and others of 
 her own besides, 2 and when she died the ' Flamen 
 or Priest of Jupiter had to give up his Priesthood 
 
 1 Plutarch, Romane Questions, 40. 
 
 2 Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 117. 
 
TABOO 155 
 
 or Sacerdotall dignitie. 1 1 Plutarch was greatly 
 puzzled in his search after a rational explanation 
 of these and kindred matters, and he has many a 
 fanciful comment upon them, erroneous as well 
 as fanciful, because it did not occur to him that 
 the explanation must be sought in the per- 
 sistence of the barbaric ideas of remote ancestors. 
 This perception of continuity, illuminated by 
 numerous examples at home and abroad, is 
 wholly modern, and therefore, after tracking the 
 vitality of a belief or custom among the illiterate 
 in civilised communities, we cross the seas in 
 search of parallels among barbaric folk. In Lower 
 Guinea, the priest-king, who was a wind-god, was 
 not allowed to quit his chair to sleep, because if 
 he lay down no wind could arise ; while in Congo 
 it was held that if the incarnated priest-king died 
 a natural death, the world would perish. There- 
 for, like the Rex Nemorensis, he had to be kept 
 in vigour at the risk of his life, ' worshipped as a 
 god one day, and killed as a criminal the next. 1 
 As these wind and weather gods are held re- 
 sponsible for droughts and bad harvests, it is not 
 
 1 Romane Questions, 50. 
 
156 TABOO 
 
 surprising that there is no rush of candidates for 
 vacant thrones with their miserable restraints 
 and isolation, and that the tactics of the press- 
 gang have sometimes to be resorted to in order 
 that the succession of the incarnated may not be 
 broken. 
 
 In this group of customs hedging in the royal 
 person and his belongings there lie the materials 
 out of which has been evolved the well-nigh 
 obsolete and long mischievous theory of the 
 right divine of kings, with its resulting belief 
 in their possession of powers bordering on the 
 supernatural, as in the curing of scrofula by 
 their touch. When Charles i. visited Scot- 
 land in 1633, he is said to have 'heallit one 
 hundred persons of the cruelles or Kings eivell, 
 young and olde, 1 in Holyrood Chapel on St. 
 John's day; 1 and, although William in. had the 
 good sense to pooh-pooh it, it was not until the 
 reign of George i. that the custom was abolished. 
 
 The intangible, even more than the tangible, 
 would be the subject of taboo, as coming near 
 the confines of that spiritual realm where man 
 
 1 Daly ell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, p. (>2 (18:*4). 
 
TABOO 157 
 
 had no control. Hence the secrecy which hedged 
 the royal name ; a feature which Mr. Frazer 
 omits from his otherwise comprehensive survey. 
 
 In China the ming or proper name of the 
 reigning Emperor (sight of whom is tabooed 
 when he appears in public, even his guards 
 having to turn their back to the line when the 
 Son of Heaven approaches 1 ) is sacred, and must 
 be spelt differently during his lifetime. Although 
 given in the prayer offered at the imperial wor- 
 ship of ancestors, it is not permitted to be written 
 or pronounced by any subject. ' The first month 
 of the Chinese year is called Ching-ut. The 
 word cliing in this particular case is pronounced 
 in the first tone or " upper monotone," though 
 it really belongs to the third or " upper falling 
 tone." } A Chinese work explains this as follows : 
 There lived in the third century B.C. a noted 
 Emperor who assumed the title of She Hwang- 
 Ti. He succeeded to the throne of China (T'sin) 
 at the age of thirteen, and, following up the 
 career of conquest initiated by his tutor, he was 
 able to found a new empire on the ruins of the 
 
 1 William Simpson, Meeting the Sun, p. 153. 
 
158 TABOO 
 
 Chinese feudal system, and in the twenty-sixth 
 year of his reign declared himself sole master of 
 the Chinese Empire. He was superstitious, and 
 his desire to be considered great shows itself in 
 the manner in which he destroyed the classics of 
 his land, that his name might be handed down to 
 posterity as the first Emperor of China. His 
 name was Ching, and, that it might be ever held 
 sacred, he commanded that the syllable ching be 
 tabooed. Hence the change in pronunciation 
 referred to.'' 1 No Korean dare utter his king's 
 name. When the king dies he is given another 
 name, by which his royal personality may be 
 kept clear in the mass of names that fill history. 
 But his real name, the name he bears in life, is 
 never spoken save in the secrecy of the palace 
 harem. And even there it is spoken only by the 
 privileged lips of his favourite wife and his most 
 spoiled children. 2 Polack says that from a New 
 Zealand chief being called ' Wai,' which means 
 ' water,' a new name had to be given to water. 
 A chief was called ' Maripi,' or ' knife,' and 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 73. 
 
 - Times, :<0th August 1S!M. 
 
TABOO 159 
 
 knives were therefore called by another name, 
 6 nekra.' l In Tahiti, when a chief took highest 
 rank, any words resembling his name were 
 changed : ' even to call a horse or dog " prince " 
 or " princess " was disgusting to the native mind.' 2 
 The custom is known as te pi, and, in the 
 case of a king whose name was Tu, all words in 
 which that syllable occurred were changed : for 
 example, fetu, star, becoming Jetia ; or tui, 
 to strike, being changed to tiai. Vancouver 
 observes that at the accession of that ruler, 
 which took place between his own visit and that 
 of Captain Cook, no less than forty or fifty of 
 the names most in daily use had been entirely 
 changed. As Professor Max Miiller ingeniously 
 remarks, ' It is as if with the accession of Queen 
 Victoria, either the word Victory had been 
 tabooed altogether, or only part of it, as tori, so 
 as to make it high treason to speak of Tories 
 during her reign. 1 On his accession to royalty, 
 the name of the king of the Society Islands was 
 changed, and any one uttering the old name was 
 
 1 Tylor, Earl;/ History of Mankind, p. 147. 
 
 2 Captain Cook, Third Voyage, vol. ii. p. 170. 
 
160 TABOO 
 
 put to death with all his relatives. Death was 
 the penalty for uttering the name of the king of 
 Dahomey in his presence ; his name was, indeed, 
 kept secret lest the knowledge of it should enable 
 any enemy to harm him ; hence the names by 
 which the different kings have been known to 
 Europeans are aliases in native term, 'strong 
 names/ l The London newspapers of June 1890 
 reprinted extracts from a letter in the Vossischc 
 Zeitung relating the adventures of Dr. Bayol, 
 Governor of Kotenon, who had been imprisoned 
 by the King of Dahomey. The king was too 
 suspicious to sign the letter written in his name 
 to the President of the French Republic, pro-, 
 bably through fear that M. Carnot might 
 bewitch him through it. 2 An interesting com- 
 ment on the foregoing examples is supplied by a 
 painting on the temple of Rameses n. at Gurnah, 
 whereon Turn, Safeklit, and Thoth are depicted 
 as inscribing that monarch's name on the sacred 
 tree of Heliopolis, by which act he was endowed 
 with eternal life. 3 
 
 1 Ellis, Ewe-Speaking Peoples, p. 93. 
 
 2 E. S. Hartlaud, Science of Fairy Tales, p. 310. 
 
 " Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, y>. l">r>. 
 
TABOO 161 
 
 The separation of the priestly and kingly 
 offices, which followed the gradual subdivision of 
 functions in society, tended to increase the power 
 of the priest in the degree that he represented 
 the kingdom of the invisible and the dreaded, 
 and held the keys of admission therein. The 
 king, who reigned by the grace of God, as the 
 term goes in civilised communities, was con- 
 secrated to his office by the minister of God, and, 
 hence, there could not fail to arise the conflicts 
 between the temporal and the spiritual dignities 
 of which history tells, a modern example of these 
 being the relations between the Quirinal and the 
 Vatican. The prerogatives which the Church 
 claimed could only be granted by the State con- 
 senting to accept a position of vassalage illus- 
 trated by the submission of Henry iv. in the 
 courtyard of Gregory vn. at Canossa. Whatever 
 appertained to the sacerdotal office reflected the 
 supreme importance of its functions ; the priest, 
 as incarnation of the god, transferred into his 
 own person that which had secured sanctity and 
 supremacy to the priest-king, and the king was 
 so much the poorer. The supernatural power 
 
162 TABOO 
 
 which the priest claimed tended to isolate him 
 more and more from his fellows, and place him 
 in the highest caste, whose resulting conservatism 
 and opposition to all challenge of its claims have 
 been among the chief arresting forces in human 
 progress. For to admit that these claims were open 
 to question would have been fatal to the existence 
 of the priestly order. The taboos guarding and 
 regulating the life of the priest-king therefore 
 increase in rigidity when applied to priest and 
 shrine ; and how persistent they are is seen in the 
 feeling amongst the highest races that the mal- 
 treating or killing of a priest is a greater crime 
 than the maltreating or killing of a layman, and 
 that the robbery of a church is a greater offence 
 than the devouring of widows' houses. 
 
 These remarks are designed to show that the 
 examples of royal and sacerdotal taboos cited 
 above have increased force when applied to 
 priests in their ascending degrees from medicine- 
 men to popes ; and perhaps one of the most 
 striking illustrations of this is supplied by the 
 record of customs attaching to the holy and 
 hidden name of the priests of Eleusis. A brief 
 
TABOO 163 
 
 account of this may close the references to name- 
 avoidance and name-substitution so far as the 
 living are concerned. 
 
 Some years ago a statue of one of these hiero- 
 phants was found in that ancient seat of 'the 
 Venerable Mysteries of Demeter, the most solemn 
 rites of the Pagan world/ The inscription on 
 its base ran thus : < Ask not my name, the mystic 
 rule (or packet) has carried it away into the blue 
 sea. But when I reach the fated day, and go to 
 the abode of the blest, then all who care for me 
 will pronounce it." When the priest was dead, 
 his sons added some words, of which only a 
 few are decipherable, the rest being mutilated. 
 'Now we, his children, reveal the name of the 
 best of fathers, which, when alive, he hid in 
 the depths of the sea. This is the famous 
 Apollonius. . . ,' 1 
 
 The name which the priest thus desired should 
 be kept secret until his death was the holy name 
 usually that of some god which he adopted 
 on taking his sacred office. Directly he assumed 
 
 1 W. R. Paton, 'The Holy Names of the Eleusinian Priests,' 
 International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, Papers and Transactions, 
 pp. 202 ft. 
 
164 TABOO 
 
 that name, it was probably written on a tablet, 
 so that, as symbol of its secrecy, it might be 
 buried in the depths of the sea; but when he 
 went 'to the abode of the blest," it was ' pro- 
 nounced, ' and became the name by which he was 
 known to posterity. Some interesting questions 
 arise out of the ceremonies attaching to the 
 name-concealment. Among these, the chief one 
 is the committal to the sea, which is probably 
 connected with lustration rites ; a connection 
 further evidenced by the choice of salt instead of 
 fresh water. The custom of sending diseases 
 and demons out to sea in canoes or in toy-ships, 
 is not unknown in Malaysia and other parts ; but 
 discussion on modes of transfer and expulsion of 
 evils would lead us too far afield, and it suffices 
 to say that, in this custom of the Greek priest- 
 hood, there was a survival of the barbaric taboo 
 which conceals an individual's name for the same 
 reason that it burns or buries his material 
 belongings. 
 
 (c) TABOO ON NAMES OF THE DEAD 
 Passing from the living to the dead* and to 
 
TABOO 165 
 
 spiritual beings generally, we find the power of 
 taboo increased in the degree that it invests 
 things more mysterious. The conflicting be- 
 haviour of the barbaric mind towards ghosts 
 and all their kin should be a warning to the 
 framers of cut-and- dried theories of the origin 
 of religion, since no one key fits the complex 
 wards of the lock opening the door of the 
 unseen. Sometimes the spirits of the dead are 
 tempted by offerings at the graves; holes are 
 cut in the rude stone tombs to let them out, or 
 to pass-in food to them ; at other times, all sorts 
 of devices are adopted to prevent them from 
 finding their way back to their old haunts, the 
 one object being to 'lay the ghost. 1 While 
 memory of them abides, a large number receive 
 a vague sort of worship in which fear is the chief 
 element, only a few securing such renown as 
 obtains their promotion to the rank of godlings, 
 and, by another step or two, of gods. Others there 
 are for whom no hope of deification removes the 
 terrors of the underworld ; while the remainder, 
 in their choice of evils, would accept the cheerless 
 Hades so that they might not wander as un- 
 
166 TABOO 
 
 buried shades. All which is bewildering enough 
 and fatal to any uniformity of principle ruling 
 conceptions of another life, but not less bewilder- 
 ing than the result of any attempt to extract 
 from intelligent people who believe in a future 
 state some coherent idea of what happens to the 
 soul between death and the day of judgment. 
 Vague and contradictory as both savage and 
 civilised notions on these matters may be, there 
 is, nevertheless, at the base a common feeling 
 that prompts to awe and hushed tone when 
 speaking of the dead. To quote from Mrs. 
 Barrett Browning's ' Cowper's Grave,' he is 
 
 ' Named softly as the household name of one whom God 
 hath taken.' 
 
 Among a large number of barbaric races he is 
 never named, because to do so is to disturb him 
 or to summon him, and that is the last thing 
 desired. When any member of a tribe died, the 
 Tasmanians abstained ever after from mentioning 
 his name, believing that to do so would bring 
 dire calamities upon them. In referring to such 
 an one, they would use great circumlocution ; for 
 example, ' if William and Mary, husband and 
 
TABOO 167 
 
 wife, were both dead, and Lucy, the deceased 
 sister of William, had been married to Isaac, also 
 dead, whose son Jemmy still survived, and they 
 wished to speak of Mary, 1 they would say, ' the 
 wife of the brother of Jemmy's father's wife/ 
 So great was their fear of offending the shade of 
 the dead by naming him, that they took every 
 precaution to avoid being drawn into talk about 
 him with white men. And that reluctance was 
 extended to the absent, Backhouse recording that 
 one of the women threw sticks at J. Thornton on 
 his mentioning her son, who was at school at 
 Newtown. 1 The Tasmanian circumlocution is 
 equalled by that of the Australian native from 
 whom Dr. Lang tried to learn the name of a 
 slain relative. ' He told me who the lad's father 
 was, who was his brother, what he was like, how 
 he walked, how he held his tomahawk in his left 
 hand instead of his right, and who were his com- 
 panions ; but the dreaded name never escaped his 
 lips, and, I believe, no promises or threats could 
 have induced him to utter it.' 2 Lumholtz 3 
 
 1 H. Ling Roth, The Tasmanians, p. 74. 
 
 2 Queensland, p. 367. 
 
 3 Among Cannibals, p. 278. 
 
168 TABOO 
 
 remarks that none of the Australian aborigines 
 4 utter the names of the dead, lest their spirits 
 should hear the voices of the living, and thus 
 discover their whereabouts ' ; and Sir George 
 Grey says that the only modification of the taboo 
 which he found among them was a lessened 
 reluctance to utter the name of any one who had 
 been dead for some time. 1 In this they differ 
 from some folk nearer home, for the Shetland 
 Island widow cannot be got to mention the name 
 of her husband, although she will talk of him by 
 the hour. No dead person must be mentioned, 
 6 for his ghost will come to him who speaks his 
 name.' 2 Dorman gives a touching illustration 
 of this superstition in the Shawnee myth of 
 Yellow Sky. She was a daughter of the tribe, 
 and had dreams which told her that she was 
 created for an unheard-of mission. There was a 
 mystery about her being, and none could com- 
 prehend the meaning of her evening songs. The 
 paths leading to her father's lodge were more 
 beaten than those to any other. On one con- 
 
 1 Travels in N. W. Australia, vol. ii. p. 232. 
 
 2 Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 144. 
 
TABOO 169 
 
 dition alone at last she consented to become a 
 wife, namely, that he who wedded her should 
 never mention her name. If he did, she warned 
 him, a sad calamity would befall him, and he 
 would for ever thereafter regret his thoughtless- 
 ness. After a time Yellow Sky sickened and 
 died, and her last words were that her husband 
 might never breathe her name. For five summers 
 he lived in solitude, but one day, as he was by 
 the grave of his dead wife, an Indian asked him 
 whose it was, and in forgetfulness he uttered 
 the forbidden name. He fell to the earth in 
 great pain, and as darkness settled round about 
 him a change came over him. Next morning, 
 near the grave of Yellow Sky, a large buck was 
 quietly feeding. It was the unhappy husband. 1 
 Conversely, in Swedish folk-lore, the story is told 
 of a bridegroom and his friends who were riding 
 through a wood, when they were all transformed 
 into wolves by evil spirits. After the lapse of 
 years, the forlorn bride was walking one day in 
 the same forest, and in anguish of heart, as she 
 thought of her lost lover, she shrieked out his 
 1 P. 155. 
 
170 TABOO 
 
 name. Immediately he appeared in human form 
 and rushed into her arms. The sound of his 
 Christian name had dissolved the devilish spell that 
 bound him. Among both the Chinook Indians 
 and the Lenguas of Brazil, the near relatives of 
 the deceased changed their names, lest the spirit 
 should be drawn back to earth by hearing the 
 old name used ; while in another tribe, ' if one 
 calls the dead by name, he must answer to the 
 dead man's relatives. He must surrender his 
 own blood, or pay blood-money in restitution 
 of the life of the dead taken by him." 1 The 
 Abipones invented new words for anything whose 
 name recalled the dead person's memory, while 
 to utter his name was a nefarious proceeding ; 
 and among certain northern tribes, when a death 
 occurred, if a relative of the deceased was absent, 
 his friends would hang along the road by which 
 he would return to apprise him of the fact, so 
 that he might not mention the dreaded name 
 on his arrival. Among the Connecticut tribes, 
 if the offence of naming the dead was twice 
 repeated, death was not regarded as a punish- 
 
 1 First American Report of Bureau of Ethnology, p. 204. 
 
TABOO 171 
 
 ment too severe. In 1655, Philip, having heard 
 that another Indian had spoken the name of his 
 deceased relative, came to the island of Nantucket 
 to kill him, and the English had to interfere to 
 prevent it. 1 If among the Californian tribes 
 the name of the dead was accidentally mentioned, 
 a shudder passed over those present. An aged 
 Indian of Lake Michigan explained why tales of 
 the spirits were told only in winter, by saying 
 that when the deep snow is on the ground the 
 voices of those who repeat their names are muffled, 
 but that in summer the slightest mention of them 
 must be avoided, lest in the clear air they hear 
 their own names and are offended. 2 Among the 
 Fuegians, when a child asks for its dead father or 
 mother, it will be reproved and told not to ' speak 
 bad words 1 ; and the Abipones, to whom reference 
 has just been made, will use some periphrasis for 
 the dead, as ' the man who does not now exist." 
 My friend Louis Becke tells me that 'in the 
 olden days in the Ellice Islands, it was customary 
 to always speak of a dead man by some other 
 
 1 Dorman, p. 154. 
 
 2 Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 314. 
 
172 TABOO 
 
 name than that which he had borne when alive. 
 For instance, if Kino, who in life was a builder 
 of canoes, died, he would perhaps be spoken of as 
 " teaura moli," i.e. " perfectly fitting outrigger," 
 to denote that he had been especially skilled in 
 building and fitting an outrigger to a canoe. 
 He would never be spoken of as Kino, though 
 his son or grandson might bear his name heredi- 
 tarily/ As bearing on this last remark, among 
 the Iroquois, the name of a dead man could not be 
 used again in the lifetime of his oldest surviving 
 son without the consent of the latter. 1 
 
 To this list might be added examples of 
 like name-avoidance of the dead among Ostiaks, 
 Ainos, Samoyeds, Papuans, Masai, and numerous 
 other peoples at corresponding low levels of 
 culture, but that addition would only lend super- 
 fluous strength to world- wide evidence of a prac- 
 tice whose motive is clear, and whose interest for 
 us chiefly lies in its witness to the like attitude 
 of the human mind before the mystery of the 
 hereafter. 
 
 1 L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 79. 
 
TABOO 173 
 
 (d) TABOO ON THE NAMES OF GODS 
 
 As with names of the lesser hierarchy of 
 spirits, so with the name of a god ; but with 
 the added significance which deity imports. To 
 know it, is to enable the utterer to invoke him. 
 Moreover, it enables the human to enter into 
 close communion with the divine, even to obtain 
 power over the god himself. Hence the refusal 
 of the god to tell his name, and of the devices 
 employed to discover it. On the other hand, the 
 feeling that the god is jealous of his name, and 
 full of threatenings against those who take it in 
 vain, gives rise to the employment of some other 
 name. But, whatever may be the attitude of 
 the worshipper, there is belief in the power of 
 the name, and in virtues inhering therein. The 
 gods whom man worships with bloody rites are 
 made in his own image, and the names given 
 them which he dreads to pronounce are his own 
 coinage. But the lapse of time, ever invest- 
 ing with mystery that which is withdrawn or 
 receding, and the stupendous force of tradition, 
 which transmutes the ordinary into the excep- 
 
174 TABOO 
 
 tional, explain the paradox. And any survey 
 of the confusion between persons and things 
 supplies such illustration of the vagaries of the 
 human mind at the barbaric stage that we cease 
 to look for logical sequence in its behaviour. 
 Even where we might feel warranted in expect- 
 ing a certain consistency, or a certain percep- 
 tion of fundamental differences, we find the 
 insight lacking. Here, too, tradition asserts its 
 power ; we see how superficial are the changes in 
 human nature as a whole, and in what small 
 degree the ' old Adam ' has been cast out. A 
 striking illustration of the belief in the power 
 over the god which mortals may secure by know- 
 ledge of his name is supplied by the conceal- 
 ment of the name of the tutelary deity of Rome. 
 Plutarch asks, ' How commeth it to passe, that it 
 is expressly forbidden at Rome, either to name 
 or to demaund ought as touching the Tutelar 
 god, who hath in particular recommendation 
 and patronage the safetie and preservation of 
 the citie ; nor so much as to enquire whether 
 the said deitie be male or female ? And verely 
 this prohibition proceedeth from a superstitious 
 
TABOO 175 
 
 feare that they have, for that they say, that 
 Valerius Soranus died an ill death because he 
 presumed to utter and publish so much." l Plu- 
 tarch's answer shows more approach to the true 
 explanation than is his wont. He continues the 
 interrogative strain : ' Is it in regard of a cer- 
 taine reason that some Latin historians do 
 alledge ; namely, that there be certaine evoca- 
 tions and enchantings of the gods by spels and 
 charmes, through the power whereof they are of 
 opinion that they might be able to call forth 
 and draw away the Tutelar gods of their enemies, 
 and to cause them to come and dwell with them; 
 and therefore the Romans be afraid lest they 
 may do as much for them ? For, like as in times 
 past the Tyrians, as we find upon record, when 
 their citie was besieged, enchained the images of 
 their gods to their shrines, 2 for feare they would 
 abandon their citie and be gone, and as others 
 demanded pledges and sureties that they should 
 come againe to their place, whensoever they sent 
 them to any bath to be washed, or let them go 
 
 1 Romane Questions, 61. 
 
 3 On the custom of binding of gods, see paper by Wm. Crooke, 
 Folk-Lore, 1897, pp. 325-355. 
 
176 TABOO 
 
 to any expiation to be cleansed ; even so the 
 Romans thought, that to be altogether unknowen 
 and not once named, was the best meanes, and 
 surest way to keepe with their Tutelar god. 1 
 Pliny says that Verrius Flaccus quotes authors, 
 whom he thinks trustworthy, to the effect that 
 when the Romans laid siege to a town, the first 
 step was for the priests to summon the guardian 
 god of the place, and to offer him the same or a 
 greater place in the Roman pantheon. This 
 practice, Pliny adds, still remains in the pontifical 
 discipline, and it is certainly for this reason that 
 it has been kept secret under the protection of 
 what god Rome itself has been, lest its enemies 
 should use like tactics. 1 
 
 The greater gods of the Roman pantheon were 
 of foreign origin ; the religion of the Romans 
 was wholly designed for use in practical life, and 
 the gods who ruled human affairs in minutest 
 detail from the hour of birth to that of death 
 and burial were shapeless abstractions. Cunina 
 was the guardian spirit of the cradle ; Rumina, 
 the spirit of suckling. Educa and Potina, the 
 
 1 Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 127. 
 
TABOO 177 
 
 spirits of eating and drinking, watched over the 
 child at home ; Abeona and Iterduca, the spirits 
 of departing and travelling, attended him on his 
 journey ; Adeona and Domiduca, the spirits of 
 approaching and arrival, brought him home 
 again. The threshold, the door, and the hinges 
 each had its attendant spirit, Limertinus, For- 
 culus, and Cardea ; while Janus presided over 
 door-openings, guarding the household from evil 
 spirits. Agriculture being the main occupation, 
 there were spirits of harrowing, ploughing, sow- 
 ing, harvesting, and threshing ; while Pecunia, 
 the spirit of money, attended the trader, and 
 Portunus, the harbour-spirit, guided the mer- 
 chant vessel safe to port. These vague numina 
 are known as ' Di Indigetes,"* and it was part of 
 the duty of the pontiffs to keep a complete 
 register of them on lists called indigit amenta. 
 Our interest here lies in the fact that they show 
 how little, if at all, the Roman was above the 
 savage, because he believed that it was sufficient to 
 utter the names of any one of the 6 Di Indigetes "* 
 to secure its presence and protection. Hence the 
 importance of omitting the name of no spirit 
 
178 TABOO 
 
 from the pontifical lists. 1 Among the Peniten- 
 tial Psalms of the Babylonian scriptures, which, 
 in the opinion of Professor Sayce, date from 
 Accadian times, and which, in their depth of 
 feeling and dignity, bear comparison with the 
 Psalms of the Hebrews, we find the worshipper 
 pleading 
 
 ' How long, O god, whom I know,, and know not, shall 
 
 the fierceness of thy heart continue ? 
 How long, O goddess, whom I know, and know not, 
 
 shall thy heart in its hostility be (not) appeased ? 
 Mankind is made to wander, and there is none that 
 
 knoweth ; 
 Mankind, as many as pronounce a name, what do they 
 
 know ? ' 
 
 Upon which Professor Sayce remarks : ' The belief 
 in the mysterious power of names is still strong 
 upon him. In fear lest the deity he has offended 
 should not be named at all, or else be named 
 incorrectly, he does not venture to enumerate the 
 gods, but classes them under the comprehensive 
 titles of the divinities with whose names he is 
 acquainted, and of those of whose names he is 
 ignorant. It is the same when he refers to the 
 
 Ihne, History of Rome, vol. i. p. 120 ; Mommsen, 
 Rome, vol. i. pp. 34, 111; Jevons, Introd. Romnoc ( 
 p. Ivii; Grainger, Worship of the JtolMM*, p. 134. 
 
TABOO 179 
 
 human race. Here, again, the ancient supersti- 
 tion about words shows itself plainly. If he 
 alludes to mankind, it is to " mankind as many 
 as pronounce a name," as many, that is, as have 
 names which may be pronounced. 1 1 
 
 The modern worshipper is nearer to the 
 ancient Roman and Chaldean, and to the bar- 
 barian of past and present time, than he sus- 
 pects. Every religious assembly for even sects 
 who, like the Quakers, eschew all ritual, break 
 the silence of their gatherings when the ' spirit 
 moveth ' invokes the Deity in the feeling that 
 thereby His nearer presence is the more assured. 
 So that the line between the lower and the higher 
 civilisation is hard to draw in this matter. 
 And although undue stress might be laid on 
 certain passages in the Bible which convey the 
 idea of the integral relation between the Deity 
 and His name, it is not to be questioned that 
 the efficacy of certain rites, notably that of 
 baptism and of exorcism, or the casting-out of 
 demons, would be doubted if the name of the 
 Deity was omitted. 
 
 1 Hibbert Lectures, 1887, pp. 350, 353. 
 
180 TABOO 
 
 That the gods of the higher religions, or their 
 representatives, are described as reluctant to 
 tell their names, and as yielding only through 
 strategy or cunning, is in keeping with barbaric 
 conceptions. In the Book of Judges 1 we read 
 that ' Manoah said unto the angel of the Lord, 
 What is thy name, that when thy sayings come 
 to pass we may do thee honour ? And the 
 angel of the Lord said unto him, Why askest 
 thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret ? ' 
 (or wonderful, as in the margin of the Authorised 
 Version). A Turin papyrus, dating from the 
 twentieth dynasty, preserves a remarkable legend 
 of the great Ra, oldest of the gods, and one who, 
 ruling over men as the first king of Egypt, is 
 depicted as in familiar converse with them. The 
 dignity of the story, Englished by Dr. Wallis 
 Budge, demands that it be given with only the 
 slightest abridgement. 
 
 Now Isis was a woman who possessed words of 
 power ; her heart was wearied with the millions of 
 men, and she chose the millions of the gods, but she 
 esteemed more highly the millions of the khus. 
 And she meditated in her heart, saying, ' Cannot 1 
 i Chap. xiii. 17, 18. 
 
TABOO 181 
 
 by means of the sacred name of God make myself 
 mistress of the earth and become a goddess like 
 unto Ra in heaven and upon earth ? ' Now, behold,, 
 each day Ra entered at the head of his holy 
 mariners and established himself upon the throne 
 of the two horizons. The holy one had grown old, 
 he dribbled at the mouth, his spittle fell upon the 
 earth, and his slobbering dropped upon the ground. 
 And Isis kneaded it with earth in her hand, and 
 formed thereof a sacred serpent in the form of a 
 spear; she set it not upright before her face, but 
 let it lie upon the ground in the path whereby the 
 great god went forth, according to his heart's desire, 
 into his double kingdom. Now the holy god arose, 
 and the gods who followed him as though he were 
 Pharaoh went with him ; and he came forth accord- 
 ing to his daily wont ; and the sacred serpent bit 
 him. The flame of life departed from him, and 
 he who dwelt among the Cedars (?) was overcome. 
 The holy god opened his mouth, and the cry of his 
 majesty reached unto heaven. His company of 
 gods said, ' What hath happened ? ' and his gods 
 exclaimed, ' What is it ? ' But Ra could not answer, 
 for his jaws trembled and all his members quaked ; 
 the poison spread swiftly through his flesh just as 
 the Nile invadeth all his land. When the great god 
 had stablished his heart, he cried unto those who 
 were in his train, saying, ' Come unto me, O ye who 
 have come into being from my body, ye gods who 
 have come forth from me, make ye known unto Khe- 
 pera that a dire calamity hath fallen upon me. My 
 heart perceiveth it, but my eyes see it not ; my hand 
 
182 TABOO 
 
 hath not caused it, nor do I know who hath done 
 this unto me. Never have I felt such pain, neither 
 can sickness cause more woe than this. I am a prince, 
 the son of a prince, a sacred essence which hath 
 proceeded from God. I am a great one, the son of 
 a great one, and my father planned my name ; I 
 have multitudes of names and multitudes of forms, 
 and my existence is in every god. I have been 
 proclaimed by the heralds Imu and Horus, and my 
 father and my mother uttered my name ; but it 
 hath been hidden within me by him that begat 
 me, who would not that the words of power of 
 any seer should have dominion over me. I came 
 forth to look upon that which I had made, I was 
 passing through the world which I had created, 
 when lo ! something stung me, but what I know 
 not. Is it fire? Is it water? My heart is on fire, 
 my flesh quaketh, and trembling hath seized all my 
 limbs. Let there be brought unto me the children 
 of the gods with healing words and with lips that 
 know, and with power which reacheth unto heaven.' 
 The children of every god came unto him in 
 tears, Isis came with her healing words, and her 
 mouth full of the breath of life, with her enchant- 
 ments which destroy sickness, and with her words 
 of power which make the dead to live. And she 
 spake, saying, 'What hath come to pass, O holy 
 father ? What hath happened ? A serpent hath 
 bitten thee, and a thing which thou hast created hath 
 lifted up his head against thee. Verily it shall be 
 cast forth by my healing words of power, and I will 
 drive it away from before the sight of thy sunbeams/ 
 
TABOO 183 
 
 The holy god opened his mouth and said, ' I was 
 passing along my path,, and I was going through 
 \he two regions of my lands according to my heart's 
 cbsire, to see that which I had created, when lo ! I 
 wis bitten by a serpent which I saw not. Is it 
 fin ? Is it water ? I am colder than water, I am 
 hoter than fire. All my flesh sweateth, I quake, 
 my eye hath no strength, I cannot see the sky, and 
 the sweat rusheth to my face even as in the time of 
 sunnier/ Then said Isis unto Ra, ' O tell me 
 thy name, holy father, for whosoever shall be 
 deJnered by thy name shall live.' [And Ra said], 
 f ". have made the heavens and the earth, I have 
 odered the mountains, I have created all that is 
 aove them, I have made the water, I have made to 
 cone into being the great and wide sea, I have made 
 tfo " Bull of his mother/' from whom spring the 
 deights of love. I have made the heavens, I have 
 stKtched out the two horizons like a curtain, and I 
 hae placed the soul of the gods within them. I 
 amhe who, if he openeth his eyes, doth make the 
 ligt, and, if he closeth them, darkness cometh 
 inti being. At his command the Nile riseth, and 
 the gods know not his name. I have made the 
 hous, I have created the days, I bring forward the 
 fest/als of the year, I create the Nile-flood. I 
 mafe the fire of life, and I provide food in the 
 houes. I am Khepera in the morning, I am Ra 
 at Don, and I am Imu at even/ Meanwhile the 
 poisn was not taken away from his body, but it 
 pieied deeper, and the great god could no longer 
 wall 
 
184 TABOO 
 
 Then said Isis unto Ra, f What thou hast said is 
 not thy name. O tell it unto me, and the poison 
 shall depart ; for he shall live whose name shall be 
 revealed.' Now the poison burned like fire, and it 
 was fiercer than the flame and the furnace, and tie 
 majesty of the god said, ' I consent that Isis slull 
 search into me, and that my name shall pass frm 
 me into her/ Then the god hid himself from ;he 
 gods, and his place in the boat of millions of ytars 
 was empty. And when the time arrived for the hiart 
 of Ra to come forth, Isis spake unto her son Hcrus, 
 saying, * The god hath bound himself by an oati v o 
 deliver up his two eyes' (i.e. the sun and moon). 
 Thus was the name of the great god taken frori 
 him, and Isis, the lady of enchantments, sai(, 
 ' Depart poison, go forth from Ra. O eye <f 
 Horus, go forth from the god, and shine outsiie 
 his mouth. It is I who work, it is I who make ;o 
 fall down upon the earth the vanquished poisd ; 
 for the name of the great god hath been takn 
 away from him. May Ra live, and may the poton 
 die, may the poison die, and may Ra live ! ' Thse 
 are the words of Isis, the great goddess, the quen 
 of the gods, who knew Ra by his own name. 
 
 But after he was healed, the strong rule of he 
 old sun-god had lost its vigour, and even manlaid 
 became hostile against him : they became anrv 
 and began a rebellion. 1 
 
 1 Budge, The Book of the Dead : The papyrus of Ani iithe 
 British Museum, pp. Ixxxix-xci. Of. Wiedemann, Relink <>f 
 the Ancient Egyptians, pp. 54-56. 
 
TABOO 185 
 
 The power of the divine Name is shown in 
 many another old tradition. Effective as were 
 the qualities ascribed to magic knots, amulets, 
 drugs, and the great body of mystic rites con- 
 nected with their use, as also to conjuring by 
 numbers, incantations, and so forth, in that 
 great home of magic, Chaldea, all these yielded 
 to the power of the god's name. Before that 
 everything in heaven, earth, and the underworld 
 bowed, while it enthralled the gods themselves. 
 In the legend of the descent of Ishtar to the 
 underworld, when the infernal goddess Allat 
 takes her captive, the gods make vain effort to 
 deliver her, and in their despair beg Hea to 
 break the spell that holds her fast. Then Hea 
 forms the figure of a man, who presents himself 
 at the door of Hades, and awing Allat with 
 the names of the mighty gods, still keeping the 
 great name secret, Ishtar is delivered. 1 
 
 Lane says that it is a Moslem belief that the 
 prophets and apostles to whom alone is committed 
 the secret of the Most Great Name of God 
 (El-Izm-el-Aazam) can by pronouncing it trans- 
 
 1 Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 42. 
 
186 TABOO 
 
 port themselves (as on Solomon's magic carpet, 
 spun for him by the jinn) from place to place 
 at will, can kill the living, raise the dead, and 
 work other miracles. 1 By virtue of this name, 
 which was engraved on his seal-ring, Solomon, or 
 Suleyman, subjected the birds and the winds, 
 and, with one exception, all the jinn, whom he 
 compelled to help in the building of the Temple 
 at Jerusalem. By pronouncing it, his minister 
 Asaf was transported in a moment to the royal 
 presence. 2 Sakhr was the genie who remained 
 unsubdued, and one day when the Wise King, 
 taking a bath, intrusted the wonderful ring to 
 one of his paramours, the demon assumed 
 Solomon's form, and, securing possession of the 
 magic jewel, usurped the throne, while the king, 
 whose appearance was forthwith changed to that 
 of a beggar, became a wanderer in his own 
 realm. After long years the ring was found in 
 the stomach of a fish, Sakhr having thrown it 
 away on his detection, and so Solomon 'came 
 to his own again/ 3 In the Toldoth Jeshu, a 
 
 1 Modern Egyptians, vol. i. p. 361. 
 
 2 Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, pp. 40, 81. 
 
 3 Clouston, Group of Eastern Romances, p. 163. 
 
TABOO 187 
 
 pseudo-life of Jesus of Jewish compilation, there 
 are two legends concerning the Unutterable 
 Name. One relates that this name was engraved 
 on the corner-stone of the Temple. ' For when 
 King David dug the foundations he found there 
 a stone on which the Name of God was graven, 
 and he took it and placed it in the Holy of 
 Holies. But as the wise men feared lest some 
 ignorant youth should learn the name and be 
 able to destroy the world which God avert ! 
 they made by magic two brazen lions, which 
 they set before the entrance of the Holy of 
 Holies, one on the right, the other on the left. 
 Now, if any one were to go within and learn the 
 holy Name, then the lions would begin to roar 
 as he came out, so that from alarm and bewilder- 
 ment he would lose his presence of mind and 
 forget the Name. 
 
 'Now Jeshu left Upper Galilee and came 
 secretly to Jerusalem, and he went into the 
 Temple, and learned there the holy writing ; 
 and after he had written the incommunicable 
 Name on parchment he uttered it, with intent 
 that he might feel no pain, and then he cut 
 
188 TABOO 
 
 into his flesh and hid the parchment with its 
 inscription thereon. Then he uttered the Name 
 once more, and made so that his flesh healed 
 up again. And when he went out at the door 
 the lions roared, and he forgot the Name. 
 Therefore he hasted outside the town, cut into 
 his flesh, took the writing out, and when he had 
 studied the signs he retained the Name in his 
 memory. 1 1 
 
 The second legend, which tells of an aerial 
 conflict between Jeshu and Judas before Queen 
 Helena (!), says that ' when Jeshu had spoken 
 the incommunicable Name, there came a wind 
 and raised him between heaven and earth. 
 Thereupon Judas spake the same Name, and the 
 wind raised him also between heaven and earth. 
 And they flew, both of them, around in the 
 regions of the air, and all who saw it marvelled. 
 Judas then spake again the Name, and seized 
 Jeshu and sought to cast him to the earth. 
 But Jeshu also spake the Name, and sought to 
 cast Judas down, and they strove one with the 
 other." Ultimately Judas prevails, and casts 
 
 1 S. Baring-Gould, The Lost and Hostile Gospels, pp. 77, 78. 
 
TABOO 189 
 
 Jeshu to the ground, and the elders seize him ; 
 his power leaves him ; and he is subjected to the 
 tauntings of his captors. Being rescued by his 
 disciples, he hastened to the Jordan ; and when 
 he had washed therein his power returned, and 
 with the Name he again wrought his former 
 miracles. 1 
 
 As has been remarked already, belief in the 
 power of the Name would lead to hesitation in 
 the use of it, lest evil fall on him who uttered 
 it, and, since some term would be necessary, 
 to coinage of substitutionary names. To the 
 Mohammedans, Allah is but an epithet in place 
 of the Most Great Name to whose wonder- 
 working power reference has been made. The 
 three great gods of the limitless Hindu pantheon, 
 Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, have as their symbol 
 the mystic OM or AUM, the repetition of which 
 is believed to be all-efficacious in giving know- 
 ledge of the Supreme. Leviticus xxiv. 16, ' He 
 that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall 
 surely be put to death, and all the congregation 
 shall certainly stone him : as well the stranger, 
 
 1 S. Baring-Gould, The Lost and Hostile Gospels, p. 83. 
 
190 TABOO 
 
 as he that is born in the land, when he 
 blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put 
 to death," 2 is sometimes cited as the warrant 
 for the avoidance of the ' holy and reverend " 
 name Yahweh, or Jehovah ; but perhaps the 
 influence of Oriental metaphysics on the Jews, 
 coupled with the persistence of barbaric ideas 
 about names, may have led to a substitution 
 which appears to have been post-exilian. 4 Adonai 1 
 and ' Elohim " are sometimes used in the place of 
 Yahweh, but more often the god is anonymous, 
 ' the name ' being the phrase adopted. A doubt- 
 ful tradition says that ' Jehovah ' was uttered 
 but once a year by the high priest on the Day 
 of Atonement when he entered the Holy of 
 Holies, and, according to Maimonides, it was 
 spoken for the last time by Simon the Just. 
 The real name of Confucius is so sacred that it 
 is a statutable offence to pronounce it. Com- 
 missioner Yeh, in a conversation with Mr. 
 Wingrove Cooke, said, 'Tien means properly 
 
 1 Cf . the third commandment in the Ten Words, ' Thou shalt 
 not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain : for the Lord 
 will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain/ 
 Exod. xx. 7. 
 
TABOO 191 
 
 only the " material heaven," but it also means 
 Shang-te, "supreme ruler," "God"; for as it 
 is not lawful to use His name lightly, we name 
 Him by His dwelling-place, which is in Tien/ l 
 In his references to Osiris, Herodotus remarks 
 in one place, where he speaks of the exposure 
 of the sacred cow, 'At the season when the 
 Egyptians beat themselves in honour of one of 
 their gods whose name I am unwilling to men- 
 tion in connection with such a matter'; 2 and in 
 another, ' On this lake it is that the Egyptians 
 represent by night his sufferings whose name I 
 refrain from mentioning. 1 3 
 
 The Father of History here gives expression to 
 a feeling dominant throughout every stage of 
 culture. He differs no whit from that typical 
 savage, the Australian black-fellow, into whose 
 ear, on his initiation, the elders of the tribe 
 whisper the secret name of the sky-god Thara- 
 mulun, or Daramulun, a name which he dare not 
 utter lest the wrath of the deity descend upon 
 him. 4 
 
 1 Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv. p. 76. 
 
 2 II. 132. * II. 171. 
 
 4 A. W. Howitt, ' Some Australian Beliefs,' Journal Anthropo- 
 logical Institute, xiii. p. 192 (1883). 
 
IX 
 
 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 THERE is no essential difference between Names 
 of Power and Words of Power, and the justifi- 
 cation of any division lies wholly in its con- 
 venience. For although the implication may be 
 that the one is associated with persons, and the 
 other with things, we have sufficing evidence of 
 the hopeless entanglement of the two in the 
 barbaric mind. Both are regarded as effective 
 for weal or woe through the magic power 
 assumed to inhere in the names, and through 
 the control obtained over them through know- 
 ledge of those names. In examining this attitude, 
 it may be well to bear in mind what has been 
 said already concerning magic as a primitive 
 form of science ; bad science, it is true, yet 
 possessing the saving grace of some perception 
 
 192 
 
WORDS OF POWER 193 
 
 of possible relations between phenomena. For 
 here the apparatus of the priest prayer, sacri- 
 fice, and so forth is superseded, or, at least, 
 suspended, in favour of the apparatus of the 
 sorcerer with his c whole bag of tricks ' spells, 
 incantations, curses, passwords, charms, and 
 other machinery of white or black magic. In 
 his invaluable Asiatic Studies, Sir Alfred Lyall 
 remarks that among the lower religions ( there 
 seem always to have been some faint sparks 
 of doubt as to the efficacy of prayer and offer- 
 ings, and thus as to the limits within which 
 deities can or will interpose in human affairs, 
 combined with embryonic conceptions of the 
 possible capacity of man to control or guide 
 Nature by knowledge and use of her ways, or 
 with some primaeval touch of that feeling which 
 now rejects supernatural interference in the 
 order and sequence of physical processes. Side 
 by side with that universal conviction which 
 ascribed to divine volition all effects that could 
 not be accounted for by the simplest experience, 
 and which called them miracles, omens, or signs 
 of the gods, there has always been a remote 
 
194 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 manifestation of that less submissive spirit which 
 locates within man himself the power of in- 
 fluencing things, and which works vaguely 
 toward the dependence of man on his own 
 faculties for regulating his material surround- 
 ings; l 
 
 Words of Power, broadly classified, may be 
 divided, with more or less unavoidable overlap- 
 ping, into (a) Creative Words ; (b) Mantrams and 
 their kin ; (c) Passwords ; (d) Spells or Invocations 
 for conjuring up the spirit of the dead, or for 
 exorcising demons, or for removing spells on the 
 living; and (e) Cure-Charms in formulas or magic 
 words. Of each of these five intermingled classes 
 a few examples will suffice. 
 
 (a) CREATIVE WORDS 
 
 The confusion of person and thing meets us 
 at starting, and the deification of speech itself 
 warrants its inclusion in this section. Probably 
 the most striking example of such deification is 
 the Hindu goddess Vac, who is spoken of in the 
 Rig Veda 2 as 'the greatest of all deities; the 
 
 1 P. 77. - X. p. 125. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 195 
 
 Queen, the first of all those worthy of worship," 1 
 and in one of the Brahmanas, or sacerdotal com- 
 mentaries on the Vedas, as the mother 51 of those 
 sacred books. Another hymn to her declares that 
 when she was first sent forth, all that was hidden, 
 all that was best and highest, became disclosed 
 through love. 2 By sacrifice Speech was thought 
 out and found, and he who sacrifices to her 
 'becomes strong by speech, and speech turns 
 unto him, and he makes speech subject unto 
 himself.' 3 When Vac declares 
 
 e Whom I love I make mighty, I make him a Brahman, 
 
 a Seer,, and Wise. . . . 
 I have revealed the heavens to its inmost depths, I dwell 
 
 in the waters and in sea, 
 Over all I stand, reaching by my mystic power to the 
 
 height beyond. 
 I also breathe out like the wind, I first of all living 
 
 things. 
 Beyond the heavens and this earth I have come to this 
 
 great power/ 4 
 
 echoes of the sublime claims of Wisdom in the 
 Book of Proverbs haunt the ear. 
 
 1 Satapatha Brahmana, iii. 8; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, vol. v. 
 p. 342. 
 
 2 R. "VV. Frazer, Literary History of India, p. 60. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 74. 4 Rig Veda, x. 125. 
 
196 WORDSOFPOWER 
 
 f The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, 
 
 before his works of old. 
 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or 
 
 ever the earth was. 
 When there were no depths, I was brought forth ; when 
 
 there were no fountains abounding with water. . . . 
 Then I was by him, as one brought up with him : and I 
 
 was daily his delight. ' 1 
 
 In the Wisdom of Solomon, the high place of 
 6 Chockmah ' or Wisdom, as co-worker with the 
 Deity, is still more prominent ; in the Targums, 
 4 Memra ' or ' Word ' is one of the phrases sub- 
 stituted by the Jews for the great Name ; while 
 the several speculations concerning the nature 
 and functions of Wisdom in the canonical and 
 apocryphal books took orderly shape in the 
 Logos, the Incarnate Word of God, of Saint 
 John's Gospel. In Buddhism, Manjusri is the 
 personification of Wisdom, 2 although in this con- 
 nection we have to remark that this religion has 
 no theory of the origin of things, and that for the 
 nearest approach to the Vac of Hinduism (as to 
 the possible influence of which on the wisdom of 
 the Book of Proverbs, and through it on the 
 
 1 Prbv. viii. 22-24, 30. 
 
 2 Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 201. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 197 
 
 Logos, nothing can be said here) we must cross 
 into ancient Persia, in whose sacred books we 
 read of Honovar or Ahuna-variya, the ' Creat- 
 ing Word ' or the ' Word Creator.' When Zara- 
 thushtra (Zoroaster) asks Ahuramazda, the Good 
 God of the Parsi religion, which was the word 
 that he spoke 'before the heavens, the water, 
 the earth, and so forth/ Ahuramazda answers by 
 dwelling on the sacred Honovar, the mispro- 
 nunciation of which subjects a man to dire 
 penalties, while 6 whoever in this my world 
 supplied with creatures takes off in muttering a 
 part of the Ahuna-variya, either a half, or a 
 third, or a fourth, or a fifth of it, his soul will I, 
 who am Ahuramazda, separate from paradise to 
 such a distance in width and breadth as the 
 earth is.' l In his translation of Salaman and 
 Absal, wherein these lines occur, 
 
 ' . . . The Sage began, 
 O last new vintage of the vine of life 
 Planted in Paradise ; O Master-stroke,, 
 And all-concluding flourish of the Pen^ 
 KUN-FA-YAKUN,' 
 
 1 Hang's trans, of Yasna, xix. p. 7. Sacred Languages and 
 Writings of the Parsis, p. 186. 
 
198 WORDSOFPOWER 
 
 Edward FitzGerald appends as note on Kun-fa- 
 Yakun, 6 Be, and it is the famous word of 
 Creation stolen from Genesis by the Kuran.' 
 In that book we read, ' The Originator of the 
 heavens and the earth when He decrees a matter 
 He doth but say unto it, " BE," and it is,' 1 a 
 declaration which the Genesis creation-legend, 
 doubtless a transcript 2 of Accadian originals, 
 anticipates in the statement, ' And Elohim said, 
 Let there be light, and there was light.' In this 
 connection the three shouts of the Welsh, which 
 created all things, should be noted. 
 
 (b) MANTRAMS 
 
 Dr. Wallis Budge remarks that among the 
 magic formulae of which the ancient Egyptians 
 made use for the purpose of effecting results out- 
 side man's normal power, was repetition of the 
 names of gods and supernatural beings, certain 
 ceremonies accompanying the same. For they 
 believed that every word spoken under given 
 
 1 The Qur'an, trans. Palmer, Sacred Books of the East, vol. vi. 
 p. 15. 
 
 2 Probably modified by a priestly hand in Babylonia after the 
 Exile. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 199 
 
 circumstances must be followed by some effect 
 good or bad. The same idea prompts the belief 
 of the Irish peasant that a curse once uttered 
 must Uight on something ; it will float in the air 
 seven }ears, and may descend any moment on the 
 party it was aimed at. 1 Allied to this is the 
 old Scandinavian belief that a curse is powerful 
 unless it can be turned back, when it will harm 
 its utterer, for harm some one it must. 2 The 
 origin of the Egyptian superstition lies further 
 back than Dr. Budge suggests, although he is 
 probably correct in assuming that its develop- 
 meit received impetus from the belief that the 
 world and all things therein came into being 
 imnediately after Thoth, the god of writing, 
 espcially of sacred literature, had interpreted 
 in vords the will of the Deity in respect of the 
 cration, and that creation was the result of the 
 gol's command. 3 
 
 Belief in the virtue of mystic phrases, faith 
 in whose efficacy would seem to be increased 
 
 Grimm, T. M., 1227. 
 
 Saxo Grammaticus, Introduction by Professor York Powell, 
 p. xxx. 
 
 Introd. to trans, of the Book of the Dead, p. cxlviii. 
 
200 WORDSOFPOWER 
 
 in the degree that the utterers do not know their 
 meaning, is world-wide. The old lady who foand 
 spiritual comfort in 'that blessed word, Meso- 
 potamia,' has her representatives in both hemi- 
 spheres, in the matamanik of the Red Indian 
 and the ~karcikias of the New Zealand er 1 while 
 the Roman Catholic can double the nunber of 
 beads on his rosary by exchanging striigs with 
 the Tibetan. The latter, as we know, fills his 
 ' praying-wheels,' more correctly, praising-wheels, 
 with charms or texts from his sacred books, the 
 words of wonder-working power frequently pkced 
 therein, or emblazoned on silk flags, being ' Om 
 Mani padme hum,' ' Ah, the jewel in the lotis,' 
 i.e. ' the self-creative force is in the kosmos.' 
 
 But most typical of all are the sacred formdas 
 of the Hindus, the mantrams which are believed 
 'to enchain the power of the gods themselv<s.' 
 They are charged with both bane and blis ; 
 there is nothing that can resist their effe<t. 
 At their bidding the demons will enter a mai 
 or be cast out of him, and the only test of ther 
 efficacy is supplied by themselves, since a strong r 
 
 1 Taylor, Te Ika a Maori, pp. 197 /. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 201 
 
 mantram can neutralise a weaker. ' The most 
 famous and the most efficacious mantram for 
 taking away sins, whose power is so great that 
 the very gods tremble at it, is that which is 
 called the gayatri. It is so ancient that the 
 Vedas themselves were born from it. Only a 
 Brahmin has the right to recite it, and he must 
 prepare himself by the most profound medita- 
 tion. It is a prayer in honour of the sun. 
 There are several other mantrams which are 
 called gayatri, but this is the one most often 
 used.' 1 Next in importance to the gayatri^ the 
 most powerful mantram^ is the monosyllable OM 
 or AUM, to which reference has been made. 
 But, all the world over, that which may have 
 been the outcome of genuine aims has become 
 the tool of necromancers, soothsayers, and their 
 kin. These recite the mystic charms for the 
 ostensible purpose of fortune-telling, of discover- 
 ing stolen property, hidden treasure, and of 
 miracle-monger ing generally. Certain mantrams 
 are credited with special power in the hands of 
 those who have the key to the true pronuncia- 
 
 1 Abbe Dubois, Hindu Manners and Customs, vol. i. pp. 140 ff. 
 
202 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 tion, reminding us of the race - test in the 
 pronunciation of the old word Shibboleth! To 
 the rishis or sorcerers who know how to use and 
 apply these bija-aksharas, as such mantrams are 
 called, nothing is impossible. Dubois quotes 
 the following story in proof of this from the 
 Hindu poem, Brahmottara-Kanda, composed in 
 honour of Siva : ' Dasarha, King of Madura, 
 having married Kalavali, daughter of the King 
 of Benares, was warned by the princess on their 
 wedding-day that he must not exercise his rights 
 as a husband, because the tnantram of the Jive 
 letters which she had learned had so purified her 
 that no man could touch her save at the risk of 
 his life, unless he had been himself cleansed from 
 all defilement by the same word-charm. The 
 princess, being his wife, could not teach him the 
 muntram, because by so doing she would become 
 his guru, and, consequently, his superior. So 
 the next day both husband and wife went in 
 quest of the great Rishi, or penitent Garga, who, 
 learning the object of their visit, bade them fast 
 one day and bathe the following day in the holy 
 
 1 Judges xii. 6. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 203 
 
 Ganges. This being done, they returned to the 
 Rishi, who made the husband sit down on the 
 ground facing the East, and, having seated him- 
 self by his side, but with face to the West, 
 whispered these two words in his ear, " Namah 
 Sivaya." Scarcely had Dasarha heard these 
 marvellous words before a flight of crows was 
 seen issuing from different parts of his body, 
 these birds being the sins which he had com- 
 mitted; l 
 
 That the mantrams do not now work the start- 
 ling effects of which tradition tells, is explained 
 by the Brahmins as due to mankind now living in 
 the Kali-Yuga, or Fourth Age of the World, a 
 veritable age of Iron ; but they maintain that it 
 is still not uncommon for miracles to be wrought 
 akin to that just narrated, and to this which 
 follows. Siva had taught a little bastard boy 
 the mysteries of the bija-akshara or mantram of 
 the five letters. The boy was the son of a 
 Brahmin widow, and the stain on his birth had 
 caused his exclusion from a wedding-feast to 
 which others of his caste had been invited. He 
 
 1 Dubois, vol. i. 
 
204 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 took revenge by pronouncing two or three of the 
 mystic letters through a crack in the door of the 
 room where the guests were assembled. Immedi- 
 ately all the dishes that were prepared for the 
 feast were turned into frogs. Consternation 
 spread among the guests, all being sure that the 
 mischief was due to the little bastard, so, fearing 
 that worse might happen, they rushed with one 
 accord to invite him to come in. As he entered, 
 they asked his pardon for the slight, whereupon 
 he pronounced the same words backwards, 1 and 
 the cakes and other refreshments appeared, while 
 the frogs vanished. I will leave it,' remarks the 
 Abbe, ' to some one else to find, if he can, any- 
 thing amongst the numberless obscurations of 
 the human mind that can equal the extravagance 
 of this story, which a Hindu would nevertheless 
 believe implicitly.' Were that veracious recorder 
 of Oriental belief and custom alive, he would be 
 supplied from the narratives of proceedings at 
 
 1 An illustration of withershins (German wider Schcin), or 
 against the sun, as when the witches went thrice round anything 
 in that direction, or repeated the Lord's prayer backwards as an 
 oath of allegiance to the devil. The idea has well-known out- 
 come in the jocose objection to not passing the bottle sunwise, and 
 other customs whose significance has vanished. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 205 
 
 spiritualist seances with examples of modern 
 credulity as strong as those which he collected 
 in the land on which the Mahatmas look down 
 from their inaccessible peaks. 
 
 (c) PASSWORDS 
 
 The famous Word of Power, 6 Open, Sesame," 
 pales before the passwords given in the Book of 
 the Dead, or, more correctly, The Chapters of 
 Coming Forth by Day. This oldest of sacred 
 literature, venerable four thousand years B.C., 
 contains the hymns, prayers, and magic phrases 
 to be used by Osiris (the common name given to 
 the immortal counterpart of the mummy l ) in his 
 journey to Amenti, the underworld that led to 
 the Fields of the Blessed. To secure unhindered 
 passage thither, the deceased must know the 
 secret and mystical names of the Gods of the 
 Northern and Southern Heaven, of the Horizons, 
 and of the Empyreal Gate. ' As the Egyptian 
 made his future world a counterpart of the 
 
 1 The soul was conceived to have such affinity with the god 
 Osiris as to be called by his name. Wiedemann, Religion of 
 the Ancient Egyptians, p. 244. 
 
206 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 Egypt which he knew and loved, and gave to 
 it heavenly counterparts of all the sacred cities 
 thereof, he must have conceived the existence of 
 a waterway like the Nile, whereon he might sail 
 and perform his desired voyage. ' Strangest evi- 
 dence of the Egyptian extension of belief in 
 Words of Power is furnished in the requirement 
 made of the deceased that he shall tell the names 
 of every portion of the boat in which he desires 
 to cross the great river flowing to the under- 
 world. Although there is a stately impressive- 
 ness throughout the whole chapter, the citation 
 of one or two sentences must suffice. Every part 
 of the boat challenges the Osiris : 
 
 ' Tell me my name/ saith the Rudder. ' Leg of 
 Hapiu is thy name.' 
 
 1 Tell me my name/ saith the Rope. ' Hair, with 
 which Anubis finisheth the work of my embalm- 
 ment, is thy name/ 
 
 * Tell us our names/ say the Oar-rests. * Pillars 
 of the underworld is your name/ 
 
 And so on ; hold, mast, sail, blocks, paddles, 
 bows, keel, and hull each putting the same 
 question, the sailor, the wind, the river, and the 
 river-banks chiming in, and the Rubric ending 
 
WORDS OF POWER 207 
 
 with the assurance to the deceased that if ' this 
 chapter be known by him, 1 he shall ; come forth 
 into Sekhet-Aarru, and bread, wine, and cakes 
 shall be given him at the altar of the great god, 
 and fields, and an estate . . . and his body 
 shall be like unto the bodies of the gods. 1 1 
 
 But the difficulties of the journey are not 
 ended, because ere he can enter the Hall of the 
 Two Truths, that is, of Truth and Justice, 
 where the god Osiris and the forty-two judges of 
 the dead are seated, and where the declaration of 
 the deceased, that he has committed none of the 
 forty-two sins, 2 is tested by weighing his heart in 
 the scales against the symbol of truth, Anubis 
 requires him to tell the names of every part of 
 the doors, the bolts, lintels, sockets, woodwork, 
 threshold, and posts ; while the floor forbids 
 him to tread on it until it knows the names of 
 the two feet wherewith he would walk upon it. 
 These correctly given, the doorkeeper challenges 
 him, and, that guardian satisfied, Osiris bids the 
 deceased approach and partake of the sepulchral 
 
 1 Ch. xcix. (Budge, pp. 157-160). 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 197. ' The oldest known code of private and public 
 morality.' Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, p. 196. 
 
208 WORDSOFPOWER 
 
 meal.' Then after more name-tests are applied, 
 those of the watchers and heralds of the seven 
 arits or mansions, and of the twenty-one pylons 
 of the domains of Osiris, the deceased ' shall be 
 among those who follow Osiris triumphant. The 
 gates of the underworld shall be opened unto 
 him, and a homestead shall be given unto him, 
 and the followers of Horus who reap therein shall 
 proclaim his name as one of the gods who are 
 therein.' 
 
 (d) SPELLS AND AMULETS 
 
 In the famous scene in Macbeth, when the 
 witches make the 'hellbroth boil and bubble 1 
 in their 'caldron, 1 Shakespeare drew upon the 
 folk-lore of his time. Two years before he came 
 to London, Reginald Scot had published his 
 Discover? e of Witchcraft, a work which, in Mr. 
 Lecky's words, ' unmasked the imposture and 
 delusion of the system with a boldness that no 
 previous writer had approached, and an ability 
 which few subsequent writers have equalled/ In 
 that book may be found the record of many a 
 strange prescription, of which other dramatists 
 
WORDSOFPOWER 209 
 
 of Shakespeare's period, notably Middleton, 
 Heywood, and Shadwell, made use in their 
 thaumaturgic machinery. Scot's exposure of 
 the ' impietie of inchanters ' and the ' knaverie 
 of conjurers' is accompanied by examples of a 
 number of spells for raising the various grades 
 of spirits, from the ghost of a suicide to the 
 innumerable company of demons. In each case 
 the effectiveness of the spell depends on the 
 utterance of names which are a jumble of strange 
 or manufactured tongues. For example, the 
 spirits of the 'Airy Region' are conjured 
 by ' his strong and mighty Name, Jehovah,' 
 and by his 'holy Name, Tetragrammaton,' and 
 by all his 'wonderful Names and Attributes, 
 Sadat, Ollon, Emillat, Athanatos, Paracletus.' 
 Then the exorcist, turning to the four quarters, 
 calls the names, ' Gerson, Anek, Nephrion, Bas- 
 annah, Gabon,' whereupon the summoned spirits, 
 casting off their phantasms, will stand before him 
 in human form to do his bidding, to bestow the 
 gift of invisibility, foreknowledge of the weather, 
 knowledge of the raising and allaying of storms, 
 and of the language of birds. Then the exorcist 
 
210 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 dismisses them to their aerial home, in 'the 
 Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.' 1 
 
 The witch of Endor secured the appearance of 
 Samuel by the mere invocation of his name, a 
 far simpler process 2 than availed the mediaeval 
 necromancer, for he had to go to the grave at 
 midnight with candle, crystal, and hazel wand 
 on which the Name of God was written, and then, 
 repeating the words, ' Tetragrammaton, Adonai, 
 Agla, CraboiV to strike on the ground three 
 times with his wand, thereby conjuring the spirit 
 into the crystal. 
 
 The importance which the ancient Egyptians 
 attached to dreams is well known. It was the 
 universal belief that they were sent by the gods ; 
 and as matters of moment hinged on them, 
 magic was brought into play to secure the desired 
 dream. Among the formulas used for this pur- 
 pose which survive is the following : Take a 
 cat, black all over, which has been killed : pre- 
 pare a tablet, and write these words with a 
 solution of myrrh, also the dream desired, which 
 
 1 Scot, pp. 481, 482 (188f> reprint of the 1584 edition). 
 
 2 1 Samuel xxviii. 11, 12. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 211 
 
 put in the mouth of the cat : ' Keimi, Keimi, 
 I am the Great One, in whose mouth rests 
 Mommon, Thoth, Nanumbre, Karikha, . . . 
 the sacred laniee ien aeo eieeieiei aoeeo,' and so 
 on in a string of meaningless syllables which 
 were supposed to convey the hidden name of the 
 god, and thereby make him subject to the 
 magician. Then, as the conclusion, ' Hear me, 
 for I shall speak the great Name, Thoth. Thy 
 name answers to the seven vowels." 
 
 The Babylonian libraries have yielded a large 
 number of incantations for use against evil spirits, 
 sorcery, and human ills generally, the force of 
 the magic conjurations being increased in the 
 degree that they are unintelligible. For it is 
 needful to preserve the old form of the name, 
 because, although the meaning may be lost, 
 another name, or a variation of it, would not 
 possess the same virtue. 
 
 Although 
 
 ' The lion and the lizard keep 
 The courts where Jamshycl gloried and drank deep/ 
 
 these references to the superstitions that domi- 
 nated the ancient civilisations of the East, and 
 
212 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 through them, in their elaborated magical forms, 
 of the West, are of service to-day. That they 
 persisted so long is no matter of wonder, when 
 we remember how late in human history is per- 
 ception of the orderly sequence of phenomena; 
 and that persistence also explains why like con- 
 fusion prevails in communities where the scientific 
 stage has not been reached. In this matter, even 
 in these post-Darwinian days, 4 there are few that 
 be saved ' from the feeling that, in some vaguely 
 defined way, man can influence the unseen by 
 the power of spoken words. The terrible curses 
 which accompanied the once-dreaded excommuni- 
 cation have their pale echoes in our Commination 
 Service (which to most persons nowadays only 
 suggests the ' Jackdaw of Rheims "*), and both are 
 the outcome of the barbaric belief that the utter- 
 ance of the word has a direct effect on the man 
 against whom it is spoken. The belief in that 
 power was extended to the written word. Regi- 
 nald Scot gives the following charm 'against 
 theeves, 1 which ' must never be said, but carried 
 about one "* : ' I doo go, and I doo come unto 
 you with the love of God, with the humility of 
 
WORDS OF POWER 213 
 
 Christ, with the holines of our blessed ladie, with 
 the faith of Abraham, with the justice of Isaac, 
 with the vertue of David, with the might of 
 Peter, with the constancie of Paule, with the 
 word of God, with the authoritie of Gregorie, 
 with the praier of Clement, with the floud of 
 Jordan, pppcgegaqqestpti Jca b g I k 2 
 a x t g t b am g 242 i q ; pxcgkqqaqqpo 
 q q r. Oh onelie Father -f oh onlie lord + 
 and Jesus + passing through the middest of 
 them + went + In the Name of the Father 
 -f- and of the Sonne -f- and of the Holie- 
 ghost +. 11 
 
 To this class belong Gnostic amulets with their 
 cabalistic inscriptions ; the Jewish phylacteries 
 or frontlets, whose virtue was supposed to rest 
 in the texts shut up in the leathern case ; amulets 
 with the secret name of God chased on them, 
 worn by those very barbaric Christians, the 
 Abyssinians, to avert the evil eye and ward off 
 demons; passages from the Koran enclosed in 
 bags and hung on Turkish and Arab horses to 
 protect them from like maleficence ; and prayers 
 i; (Reprint), p. 188. 
 
214 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 to the Madonna slipped into charm -cases and 
 worn by the Neapolitans. Horns, as symbolic 
 of the lunar cusps, are a common form of amulet 
 against the evil eye, whether ' overlooking ' man 
 or beast, and the superstitious Italians believe 
 that, in default of a horn or some horn-shaped 
 object, the mere utterance of the word corno or 
 coma is an effective talisman. Mr. Elworthy 
 tells of a fright which he unwittingly gave a 
 secondhand bookseller in Venice when asking 
 about a copy of Valletto's Cicalata sul Fascino. 
 On hearing the last two words of the title, ' the 
 man actually turned and bolted into his inner 
 room, leaving the customer in full possession of 
 the entire stock/ 1 In modern Greece garlic is 
 the popular antidote to the evil eye, so the term 
 cricopSov is used to undo the effect of any hasty 
 or inauspicious words. The German peasant 
 says unberufen ( ; unspoken ' or ' called back "*), and 
 raps three times under the table if any word 
 6 tempting Providence "* has fallen from his lips ; 
 many a fragment of cabalistic writing is cherished 
 and concealed about their persons by the rustics 
 
 1 The Evil Eye, p. 18. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 215 
 
 of Western Europe as safeguards against black 
 magic ; and not a few still resort, in times of 
 perplexity, to the venerable form of divining fate 
 by opening the Bible or some devotional book at 
 random, hoping to see in the passage that first 
 catches the eye direction as to action, or some 
 monition of the future. For this purpose the 
 ancients consulted the Iliad or the ^Eneid ; but, 
 changing only the instrument while retaining 
 the belief, Sortes Homerlcas and Sortes Virgiliance 
 have been superseded by Sortes Biblicce. 1 As 
 for the spells which guard the departed, the 
 Book of the Dead supplied any number. Its 
 chapters were inscribed on basalt scarabs to pro- 
 tect the Osiris in his passage to Amenti ; on 
 heart-shaped amulets, so that the heart of the 
 man might not be stolen from his tomb ; while 
 on others his name was engraved, because the 
 blotting-out of a man's name brought with it 
 his extinction. There is nothing new under the 
 sun. At the burial of the late Czar a prayer 
 was chanted, and also printed on a scroll of 
 
 1 Brand's Pop. Antiq., vol. iii. p. 290; Gibbon, vol. iv. p. 358 
 (ch. xxxviii.). 
 
216 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 paper, and then placed by the priest in the 
 hands of the corpse as a document enabling him, 
 when wandering about the spirit- world during 
 the first few days after death, to pass on his way 
 unmolested by evil spirits. 1 
 
 (e) CURE- CHARMS 
 
 As gods of healing, both Apollo and ^Escu- 
 lapius were surnamed Pa?an, after the physician 
 to the Olympian deities, and the songs which 
 celebrate the healing power of Apollo were also 
 called by that name. Ever in song have the 
 deeper emotions found relief and highest expres- 
 sion, while the words themselves have been 
 credited with magic healing power. The earliest 
 fragment in the Book of Genesis is the song in 
 which Lamech chants the ' slaying of a man to 
 his wounding ' ; and as the word charm (Lat. 
 carmen, a song) itself indicates, the old incanta- 
 tions were cast in metrical form. Songs are the 
 salve of wounds. When Odysseus was maimed 
 by the boar's tusk, his kinsfolk sang a song of 
 
 1 Daily Telegraph, Nov. 20, 1894. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 217 
 
 healing; and when Wainamoinen, the hero- 
 minstrel of the Kalevala, cut his knee in hewing 
 the wood for the magic boat, he could heal the 
 wound only by learning the mystic words that 
 chant the secret of the birth of iron, while he 
 could finish the stern and forecastle only by 
 descending to Tuoni (the Finnish underworld) 
 to learn the ' three lost words of the master/ l 
 The same old hero, when challenged to trial of 
 song by the boastful youngster Joukahainen, 
 plunges him deep in morass by the power of his 
 enchantment, and releases him only on his pro- 
 mising to give him his sister Aino in marriage. 2 
 In his Art ofPoesie, written three centuries ago, 
 Puttenham quaintly says that poetry 'is more 
 ancient than the artificiatt of the Greeks and 
 Latin es, coming by instinct of nature, and used 
 by the savage and uncivill, who were before 
 all science and civiltie. This is proved by 
 certificate of merchants and travellers .... 
 affirming that the American, the Perusine, and 
 the very canniball, do sing, and also say, their 
 
 1 Kalevala, Rune xvii. 
 
 2 Ibid. Rune viii. 
 
218 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 highest and holiest matters in certain riming 
 versicles/ l Hence the part which ' dropping 
 into poetry 1 plays in saga, jataka, and folk- tale, 
 little snatches of rhyme lending effect and em- 
 phasis to incident, and also aid to memory, as in 
 our title-story 
 
 f Nimmy nimmy not, 
 My name 's Tom Tit Tot.' 
 
 Italian folk-medicine, which perhaps more than 
 in any other country in Europe has preserved its 
 empirical remedies, whose efficacy largely depends 
 on magic formulas being uttered over them, has 
 its inconsequential jingle-charms. Traces of the 
 use of these occur among the polished Romans ; 
 while Grimm refers to a song-charm for sprains 
 which was current for a thousand years over 
 Germany, Scandinavia, and Scotland. 2 How the 
 pre-Christian cure-charms are transferred by 
 change of proper names to the Christian, like 
 the conversion of Pagan deities into Christian 
 saints, is seen in these original and Christianised 
 versions : 
 
 1 Quoted in Lang's Custom and Myth, p. 157. 
 
 2 Teutonic Mythology, p. 1233. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 219 
 
 ' Phol arid Woden ' Jesus rode to the heath., 
 
 went to the wood ; There he rode the leg- 
 
 then was of Balder's colt of his colt in two, 
 his foot wrenched ; Jesus dismounted and heald 
 
 then Sinthgunt charm'd it, it ; 
 
 and Sunna her sister ; Jesus laid marrow to mar- 
 
 then Frua charm'd it, row, 
 
 and Volla her sister ; Bone to hone, flesh to flesh ; 
 
 then Woden charm'd it, Jesus laid thereon a leaf, 
 as he well could, That it might remain 
 
 as well the bone-wrench, in the same place.' 
 as the blood-wrench, 
 as the joint-wrench ; 
 bone to bone, 
 blood to blood, 
 joint to joint, 
 as if they were glued to- 
 gether.' 
 
 Probably a like substitution of names disguises 
 many barbaric word- spells ; for medicine re- 
 mained longer in the empirical stage than any 
 other science, while the repute of the miracles of 
 healing wrought by Jesus largely explains the 
 invocation of his name over both drug and 
 patient. The persistence of the superstition is 
 seen in a story told, among others of the like 
 character, in Miss Burners Shropshire Folk-Lore. 1 
 A blacksmith's wife, who had suffered from 
 
 1 P. 181. 
 
220 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 toothache, was given a charm by a young man, 
 who told her to wear it in her stays. As soon 
 as she had done so the pain left her, and it 
 never troubled her again. It was ' words from 
 Scripture that cured her," she said, adding that 
 she had relieved ( a many with it." After some 
 trouble she consented to make a copy of the 
 talisman. It proved to be an imperfect version 
 of an old ague charm given in Brand, and this is 
 the form in which the woman had it : c In the 
 Name of God, when Juses saw the Cross on 
 wich he was to be crucfied all is bones began 
 to shiver. Peter standing by said, Jesus Christ 
 cure all Deseces, Jesue Christ cure thy tooth ake. s 
 The following is a copy of a charm also against 
 toothache, stitched inside their clothing and 
 worn by the Lancashire peasants : ' Ass Sant 
 Fetter sat at the geats of Jem sal m our Blessed 
 Lord and Sevour Jesus Crist Pased by and 
 Sead, What Eleth thee ? Hee sead, Lord, my 
 teeth ecketh. Hee sead, Arise and follow mee, 
 and thy teeth shall never Eake Eney mour. 
 Fiat + Fiat + Fiat/ 1 Among cures for the same 
 
 1 Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore, p. 77. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 221 
 
 complaint in Jewish folk-medicine one prescribes 
 the driving of a nail into the wall, the formula, 
 6 Adar Gar Vedar Gar ' being uttered, and then 
 followed by these words : ' Even as this nail is 
 firm in the wall and is not felt, so let the teeth 
 of So-and-so, son of So-and-so, be firm in his 
 mouth, and give him no pain." In North-German 
 charm-cures the three maidens (perchance echoes 
 of the Norns) who dwell in green or hollow ways 
 gathering herbs and flowers to drive away diseases 
 may re-appear in the disguise to which we are 
 accustomed in the angels of many a familiar 
 incantation, as in this for scalds or burns 
 
 ' There were three angels came from East and West 
 One brought fire and another brought frost,, 
 And the third it was the Holy Ghost, 
 Out fire,, in frost, in the Name of the Father, Son,, 
 and Holy Ghost/ 
 
 Brand gives a long list of saints whose names 
 are invoked against special diseases, and the 
 efficacy believed to attach to the names of Joseph 
 and Mary is shown by sending children suf- 
 fering from whooping-cough to a house where 
 the master and mistress are so named. 'The 
 child must ask, or rather demand, bread and 
 
222 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 butter. Joseph must cut the bread, Mary must 
 spread the butter and give the slice to the child, 
 then a cure will certainly follow. In Cheshire 
 it is unlucky to take plain currant-cake from a 
 woman who has married a man of her own name 
 a superstition allied to the belief in ill-luck 
 resulting from marriage between people whose 
 surnames begin with the same letter 
 
 ' If you change the name and not the letter^ 
 You change for the worse and not for the better.' 
 
 In the preparation of a drink for the frenzied, 
 the Saxon leech recommended, besides recitations 
 of litanies and the paternoster, that over the 
 herbs twelve masses should be sung in honour of 
 the twelve apostles, 1 while the name of the sick 
 should be spoken when certain simples are pulled 
 up for his use. So, among the Amazulu, the 
 sorcerer Ufaku called Uncapayi by name that the 
 medicine might take due effect on him. 2 A 
 mediaeval remedy for removing grit from the eye 
 was to chant the psalm 'Qui habitat" three times 
 over water, with which the eye was then to be 
 
 1 Cockayne's ,sv/,rm/ /,< rol. ii. p. 139, quoted in Black*! 
 
 Folk- Medicine, p. 01. 2 Calluwuy, p. 432. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 223 
 
 douched, while modern Welsh folk-lore tells of 
 the farmer who, having a cow sick on a Sunday, 
 gave her physic, and then, fearing that she was 
 dying, ran into the house to fetch a Bible and 
 read a chapter to her. 1 An Abyssinian remedy 
 for fever is to drench the patient daily with cold 
 water for a week, and to read the Gospel of 
 Saint John to him ; and in the Chinese tale of the 
 Talking Pupils, Fang is cured of blindness by a 
 man reading the Kuang-ming sutra to him. 2 
 Among the Hindus, doctors would be regarded as 
 very ignorant, and would inspire no confidence, if 
 they were unable to recite the special mantram 
 that suits each complaint, because the cure is 
 attributed quite as much to the mantram as to the 
 treatment. It is because the European doctors 
 recite neither mantrams nor prayers that the 
 native puts little faith in their medicines. 
 Mid wives are called Mantradaris because the 
 repeating of mantrams by them is held to be of 
 great moment at the birth of the child. ' Both 
 the new-born babe and its mother are regarded 
 
 1 Elias Owen, Welsh Folk-Lore, p. 244. 
 
 2 Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, vol. i. p. G. 
 
224 WORDSOFPOWER 
 
 as specially liable to the influence of the evil eye, 
 the inauspicious combination of unlucky planets 
 or unlucky days, and a thousand other baleful 
 elements. And a good midwife, well primed 
 with efficacious mantrams, foresees all these dan- 
 gers, and averts them by reciting the proper 
 words at the proper moment. 1 x Obviously, it is 
 but a step from listening to the charm-working 
 words of sacred texts to swallowing them ; hence 
 the Chinese practice of burning papers on which 
 charms are written and mixing the ashes with 
 tea; and the Moslem practice of washing off a 
 verse of the Koran and drinking the water. The 
 amulet written on virgin parchment, and sus- 
 pended towards the sun on threads spun by a 
 virgin named Mary, equates itself with the well- 
 known cabalistic Abracadabra charm against 
 fevers and agues, which was worn for nine days, 
 and then thrown backwards before sunrise into a 
 stream running eastward. 
 
 It has been remarked already that among all 
 barbaric peoples disease and death are believed 
 to be the work of evil spirits, either of their own 
 
 1 Dubois, vol. i. p. 143. 
 
WORDS OF POWER 225 
 
 direct malice prepense or through the agency of 
 sorcerers. 'Man after man dies in the same 
 way, but it never occurs to the savage that there 
 is one constant and explicable cause to account 
 for all cases. Instead of that, he regards each 
 successive death as an event wholly by itself 
 apparently unexpected and only to be explained 
 by some supernatural agency." l In West Africa, 
 if a person dies without shedding blood it is 
 looked on as uncanny. Miss Mary Kingsley 
 tells of a woman who dropped down dead on a 
 factory beach at Corisco Bay. 4 The natives 
 could not make it out at all. They were irri- 
 tated about her conduct. " She no sick ; she no 
 complain ; she no nothing, and then she go die 
 one time.' 1 ' 1 ' The post-mortem showed a burst 
 aneurism. The native verdict was, ' She done 
 witch herself,' i.e. she was a witch eaten by 
 her own familiar. 2 That verdict was logical 
 enough, as logical as that delivered by English 
 juries two centuries ago under which women 
 were hanged as witches. In trying two widows 
 
 1 Lionel Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, p. 512. 
 
 2 Travels in West Africa, p. 468. 
 
 P 
 
WORDS OF POWER 
 
 for witchcraft at Bury St. Edmunds in 1664, Sir 
 Matthew Hale, a humane and able judge, laid 
 it down in his charge ' that there are such 
 creatures as witches I make no doubt at all ; 
 the Scripture affirms it, and the wisdom of all 
 nations has provided laws against such persons. ' 
 Given a belief in spirits, the evidence of their 
 direct or indirect activity appears in aught that 
 is unusual, or which has sufficing explanation in 
 the theory of demoniacal activity. In barbaric 
 belief, the soul or intelligent principle in which 
 a man lives, moves, and has his being plays all 
 sorts of pranks in his normal life, quitting the 
 body at sleep or in swoons, thereby giving 
 employment to an army of witch-doctors in 
 setting traps to capture it for a ruinous fee. 
 Consequently, all the abnormal things that 
 happen are attributed to the wilfulness of alien 
 spirits that enter the man and do the mischief. 
 The phenomena attending diseases lend further 
 support to the theory. When any one is seen 
 twisting and writhing in agony which wrings 
 piercing shrieks from him, or when he shivers 
 and shakes with ague, or is flung to the ground 
 
WORDSOFPOWER 227 
 
 in convulsive fit, or runs c amok ' with incoherent 
 ravings, and with wild light flashing from his eyes, 
 the logical explanation is that a disease-demon 
 has entered and 'possessed' him. Man is the 
 same everywhere at bottom ; if there are many 
 varieties, there is but one species. His civilisa- 
 tion is the rare topmost shoot of the tree whose 
 roots are in the earth, and whose trunk and 
 larger branches are in savagery. Hence, al- 
 though the study of anatomy and physiology in 
 other words, of structure and function paved the 
 way, no real advance in pathology was possible 
 until the fundamental unity and interdependence 
 of mind and body were made clear, the recency of 
 which demonstration explains the persistency of 
 barbaric theories of disease in civilised societies. 
 The Dacotah medicine-man reciting charms over 
 the patient and singing, c He-la-li-ah ' to the 
 music of beads rattling inside a gourd, is the 
 precursor of the Chaldean with his incantations 
 to drive away the ' wicked demon who seizes the 
 body, or the wind spirit whose hot breath brings 
 fever,' and to cure ' the disease of the forehead 
 which proceeds from the infernal regions. 1 The 
 
228 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 drinking of holy water and herb decoctions out 
 of a church-bell, to the saying of masses, so that 
 the demon might be exorcised from the possessed, 
 has warrant in the legends which tell of the 
 casting-out of ' devils ? by Jesus and, through 
 the invocation of his Name, by the apostles ; 
 while the continuity of barbaric ideas in their 
 grosser form has illustration in the practice of a 
 modern brotherhood in the Church of England 
 the Society of St. Osmund based on the theory 
 that not only unclean swine, but the sweet 
 flowers themselves, are the habitat of evil spirits. 
 In the Services of Holy Week from the Sarum 
 Missal the ' Clerks ' are directed to ' venerate the 
 Cross, with feet unshod, 1 and to perform other 
 ceremonies which are preceded by the driving of 
 the devil out of flowers through the following 
 ' power of the word ' : 
 
 ' I exorcise thee, creature of flowers or branches : 
 in the Name of God -f- the Father Almighty, and 
 in the Name of Jesus Christ+His son, our 
 Lord, and in the power of the -f Holy Ghost; and 
 henceforth let all strength of the adversary, all the 
 host of the devil, every power of the enemy, every 
 assault of fiends, be expelled and utterly driven 
 
WORDSOFPOWER 229 
 
 away from this creature of flowers or branches.' 
 Here the flowers and leaves shall be sprinkled with 
 HOLY WATER, and censed (pp. 3-5). 
 
 The antiquity of the demon- theory of disease 
 has curious illustration in the prehistoric and long- 
 surviving practice of trepanning skulls so that 
 the disease-bringing spirit might escape. Doubt- 
 less the disorders arising from brain-pressure, 
 diseased bone, convulsions, and so forth, led to the 
 application of a remedy which, in the improved 
 form of a cylindrical saw, and other mechanism 
 composing the trephine, modern surgery has not 
 disdained to use where removal of a portion of 
 the skull or brain is found necessary to afford 
 relief. Prehistoric trepanning, as evidenced by 
 the skulls found in dolmens, caves, and other 
 burying-places all the world over, from the Isle 
 of Bute to Peru, was effected by flint scrapers, 
 and fragments of the skulls of the dead who had 
 been thus operated upon were cut off to be used 
 as amulets by the living, or placed inside the 
 skulls themselves as charms against the dead being 
 further vexed. 1 The trepannings in Michigan, 
 
 1 Munro, Prehistoric Problems, pp. 191-238. 
 
230 WORDS OF POWER 
 
 about which we have more complete details, were 
 always made after death, and only on adults 
 of the male sex. 1 They were probably obtained 
 by means of a polished stone drill, which was 
 turned round rapidly. Whether, or in what 
 degree, the Neolithic surgeon supplemented his 
 rude scalpel by the noisy incantations which are 
 part of the universal stock-in-trade of the savage 
 medicine-man, we shall never know ; but the 
 practice of his representatives warrants the in- 
 ference which connects him with the mantram- 
 reciters, the charm-singers, and all others who 
 to this day believe that the Word of Power is the 
 most essential ingredient in the remedy applied. 
 
 1 Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 510. 
 
THE NAME AND THE SOUL 
 
 AT the close of this survey of evidence that, in 
 barbaric psychology, the name is believed to be 
 an integral part of a man, the question which 
 suggests itself is, What part ? 
 
 The importance attached by the ancient 
 Egyptians to the name in connection with its 
 owner's personality has been already referred to. 
 They had no doubt whatever that if the name 
 was blotted out, the man ceased to exist. In 
 their composite and conglomerate theories of 
 the individual we have refinements of distinc- 
 tion which surpass anything known in cognate 
 barbaric ideas. The Hidatsa Indians believe 
 that every human being has four souls which at 
 death depart one after the other. But this is 
 simplicity itself compared to Egyptian ontology. 
 
 231 
 
232 THE NAME AND THE SOUL 
 
 In this we find (1) the satin, or spiritual body ; 
 then (2) the ka, or double (other-self), which, 
 although its normal dwelling-place was the 
 tomb, could wander at will, and even take up 
 its abode in the statue of a man. It could eat 
 and drink, and, if the sweet savour of incense 
 and other ethereal offerings failed, could content 
 itself with feeding on the viands painted on the 
 walls of the tomb. Then there was (3) the ba, 
 or soul, about which the texts reveal opposing 
 views, but which is usually depicted as a bird 
 with human heads and hands. To this follow 
 (4) the ab, or heart, held to be the source both 
 of life and of good and evil in the life, and, as 
 the seat of vital power, without which there 
 could be no resurrection of the body, jealously 
 guarded against abstraction by the placing of 
 heart-shaped amulets on the mummy. 1 Next 
 in order is (5) the kJiaibit or shadow; then (6) 
 the khu or shining covering of the spiritual body 
 which dwelt in heaven with the gods; and (7) 
 the sekhem or personified power of the man. 
 
 1 See ante, p. 215. 
 
THE NAME AND THE SOUL 233 
 
 Last, but not least, was (8) the REN or name; 
 that ' part of the immortal Ego, without which 
 no being could exist. 1 Extraordinary precautions 
 were taken to prevent the extinction of the ren, 
 and in the pyramid texts we find the deceased 
 making supplication that it may flourish or 
 ' germinate ' along with the names of the gods. 1 
 The basal connection between this practice and 
 that of the importance attached to the record of 
 the name in the ' LamK's Book of Life ' as ensur- 
 ing admission to heaven, 2 which is a canon of 
 popular modern belief, is too obvious for comment. 
 Among the Pacific races, Bancroft tells us, 4 the 
 name assumes a personality, it is the shadow or 
 spirit or other-self of the flesh-and-blood person. 1 
 Civilised and savage are at one in their identifi- 
 cation of the soul with something intangible, as 
 breath, shadow, reflection, flame, and so forth. 
 But it is the cessation of breathing which, in 
 the long-run, came to be noted as the never- 
 failing accompaniment of death ; and where the 
 condensation of the exhaled breath is visible, 
 
 1 Of. Budge, pp. Ixxxvi-xc ; Wiedemann, pp. 240-243, 294. 
 
 2 Revelation iii. 5 ; xiii. 8 ; xx. 15 ; xxi. 27. 
 
234. THE NAME AND THE SOUL 
 
 there would be support lent to the theory of 
 souls as gaseous or ethereal. In every language, 
 from that of the barbaric Aino to classic Greek 
 and modern English, the word for ' spirit ' and 
 for 'breath 1 is the same. Hence, the unsub- 
 stantial ' name ' falls into line with the general 
 nebulous conception of spirit, and, were bar- 
 baric languages less mutable, it might be possible 
 to find some help to an equation between ; name ' 
 and ' soul ' in them. But as even seemingly 
 stable things like numerals and personal pro- 
 nouns undergo rapid change among the lower 
 races, ' two or three generations sufficing to alter 
 the whole aspect of their dialects among the wild 
 and unintelligent tribes of Siberia, Africa, and 
 Siam,"* the search is hopeless. Some light, how- 
 ever, is thrown upon the matter by languages in 
 which favourable circumstances have preserved 
 traces of family likeness and of mutations. In 
 asking the question, whether there be any evi- 
 dence from philology to show what part of a man 
 his name is supposed to be, Professor Rhys has 
 been first in the field to supply materials for an 
 answer. He says that ' as regards the Aryan 
 
THE NAME AND THE SOUL 235 
 
 nations, 1 we seem to have a clue in an interest- 
 ing group of words from which I select the 
 following : Irish ainm, " a name," plural anmann ; 
 Old Welsh anu, now enw, also a name ; Old 
 Bulgarian ime; Old Russian emnes, emmens, 
 accusative emnan, and Armenian anwan all 
 meaning "a name." To these some scholars 
 would add, and rightly, I think, the English 
 word name itself, the Latin nomen, Sanskrit 
 naman, and the Greek ovofjba ; but, as some 
 others find a difficulty in thus grouping these 
 last-mentioned words, I abstain from laying any 
 stress on them. In fact, I have every reason to 
 be satisfied with the wide extent of the Aryan 
 world covered by the other instances which I 
 have enumerated as Celtic, Prussian, Bulgarian, 
 and Armenian. Now, such is the similarity 
 between Welsh enw, " name," and enaid, " soul," 
 that I cannot help referring the two words to 
 one and the same origin, especially when I see 
 the same or rather greater similarity illustrated 
 by the Irish words ainm, "name," and anim, "soul." 
 
 1 As the old theory of a homogeneous 'Aryan' race is aban- 
 doned, the term connotes peoples speaking allied languages. 
 
236 THE NAME AND THE SOUL 
 
 This similarity between the Irish words so per- 
 vades the declension of them, that a beginner 
 frequently falls into the error of confounding 
 them as mediaeval texts. Take, for instance, 
 the genitive singular anma, which may mean 
 either " animae " or " nominis " ; the nominative 
 plural anmanna, which may be either " animae " 
 or "nomina"; and anmann, either "animarum" 
 or "nominum," as the dative anmannaib may like- 
 wise be either " animabus " or " nominibus." In 
 fact, one is tempted to suppose that the partial 
 differentiation of the Irish forms was only brought 
 about under the influence of Latin with its distinct 
 forms of anima and nomen. Be that as it may, the 
 direct teaching of the Celtic vocables is that they 
 are all to be referred to the same origin in the 
 Aryan word for breath or breathing, which is 
 represented by such words as Latin anima, Welsh 
 anadl, " breath," and Gothic anan 9 " blow " or 
 "breathe," whence the compound preterite ws-on, 
 twice used in the fifteenth chapter of St. Mark's 
 Gospel to render efeTT^euo-e, " gave up the 
 ghost." Lastly, the lesson which the words in 
 question contain for the student of man is that 
 
THE NAME AND THE SOUL 237 
 
 the Celts, and certain other widely separated 
 Aryans, unless we should rather say the whole 
 Aryan family, believed at one time not only that 
 the name was a part of the man, but that it was 
 that part of him which is termed the soul, the 
 breath of life, or whatever you may choose to 
 define it as being. ' 1 
 
 The important bearing of this evidence from 
 language on all that has preceded is too clear to 
 need enlarged comment. It adds another item 
 to the teeming mass of facts witnessing to the 
 psychical as well as the physical unity of man. 
 It has become a truism that at the same intel- 
 lectual level, however wide the zones that sepa- 
 rate him, he explains the same phenomena in 
 much the same way ; any set of facts gathered 
 in one quarter being complementary to any set 
 of facts gathered in another quarter. 
 
 One by one the theories armed with assumption 
 of the presence of caprice and elements of dis- 
 order in the universe have been defeated until 
 they reached their last stand in the citadel of 
 
 1 Nineteenth Century, October 1891, 'Welsh Fairies,' pp. 
 566, 567. 
 
238 THE NAME AND THE SOUL 
 
 Mansoul. From that final retreat they are being 
 ousted, because man's extension of the methods 
 of inquiry into his surroundings to his inner 
 nature makes clear that he is no exception 
 amongst animated beings, but has his place in 
 the universal order. 
 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 VARIANTS OF TOM TIT TOT 
 
 AUSTRIA, LOWER. 
 
 (Reichenau.) ' Kruzimtigeli.' Inthe Land of Marvels, 
 p. 26. Theodor Vernaleken (1884). In his 
 notes, the author refers to, and gives abstracts 
 of, variants from Gablitz, Gopfritz in der Wild, 
 Loschiitz, Modling, and Neulenbuch, all in 
 Lower Austria. 
 
 (Tyrol.) 'The Wild Jager and the Baroness.' 
 
 Household Stories from the Land ofHofer, p. 110. 
 
 R. H. Busk (1871). 
 ' Purzinigele.' Tirolo Kinder- und Hausmarchen, 
 
 No. 36. Zingerle, Innsbruck (1852), and cf. 
 
 Schneller, No. 55. 
 
 BASQUE PROVINCES. ( The Pretty but Idle Girl.' 
 Basque Legends, p. 56. Wentworth Webster. 
 
 BRITISH ISLES. 
 
 (Annandale.) 'Whuppity Stoorie.' Popular Rhymes 
 
 of Scotland, p. 76. Ed. Chambers (1841). 
 (Cornwall.) ' Duffy and the Devil.' Popular 
 
 Romances of the West of England, p. 239. 
 
 Robert Hunt (1881). 
 
240 APPENDIX 
 
 (Ireland.) ' The Idle Girl and her Aunts/ Fire- 
 side Stones. Patrick Kennedy (1879). 
 
 (TheBorder.) 'Habetrot.' Folk-Lore of the Northern 
 Comities, p. 258. W. Henderson (1879). 
 
 (Wales.) 'The Heir of Ystrad.' Cymmodor, 
 vol. iv. pp. 189-194. Professor Rhys. 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 (Lorraine.) ' Ropiquet.' Conies Populaires de 
 Lorraine, vol. i. p. 268. Emmanuel Cosquin 
 (1887). M. Cosquin refers to the following 
 variants : In Basse-Normandie, Fleury, p. 190 ; 
 Haute-Bretagne, Sebillot, i. No. 48 ; Nord- 
 ouest de la France, Melusine, 150 (1877); 
 Picardie, Romania, viii. p. 222. Benjamin 
 Thorpe, Yule-Tide Stories, p. xi, refers to the 
 French ' Ricdin-Ricdon/ in Tour tenebreuse et 
 les jours lumineux. Conies Anglais tirez d'une 
 ancienne Chronique comprise par Richard sur- 
 nomme Cceur de Lion. Amsterdam (1708). 
 
 GERMANY. 
 
 (Hesse.) ( Rumpelstiltskin' (' Rumpelstilzchen.') 
 Grimm's Household Tales, vol. i. No. 55. Trans- 
 lated by Mrs. Alfred W. Hunt. Grimm's notes 
 (p. 412) give various forms of the name, and 
 refer to the incident of name-guessing in a 
 Danish saga. Thiele, i. 45. 
 
 (Lower Saxony.) Thorpe refers to Harry's Sagett, 
 Marchen, und Legenden Niedersachsens, No. 1, 
 pp. 16-19. Celle (1840). 
 
 (South Germany.) ' Kugerl.' Kinder- und Haus- 
 
APPENDIX 241 
 
 mdrchen aus Sud-deutschland , pp. 278-280. 
 Zingerle. 
 
 (Westphalia.) Kuhn, Sagen, i. p. 298. Cosquin 
 also refers to Proehle 11, No. 20; Mullenhoff, 
 pp. 306-309, and to Toeppen, p. 138 (Prusse 
 Orientale). 
 
 HUNGARY. ' Winterkolble.' In the Land of Marvels, 
 
 p. 22. Vernal eken (see above). 
 ( The Lazy Spinning-Girl who became a Queen.' 
 
 Magyar Folk-Tales, p. 46. Kropf and Jones 
 
 (1886). 
 
 ' Panczimanczi.' Arang's Eredili Nepmesek, p. 277. 
 4 The Golden Spinster/ Sixty Folk-Tales, p. 82. 
 
 A. H. Wratislaw (1889). 
 
 ICELAND. ' Gilitrutt.' Pen and Pencil Sketches of 
 Faroe and Iceland, p. 240. Symington. 
 
 ITALY. 
 
 (Sicily.) Gonzenbach, No. 84 (see ante, p. 28 H.). 
 Thorpe refers to an Italian variant entitled 
 ' Rosania/ translated into Danish. Copenhagen 
 (1708). 
 
 MONGOLIA. ' The Use of Magic Language.' Sagas 
 from the Far East, p. 157. R. H. Busk (1873). 
 Another Oriental variant, more akin in detail 
 than that from Mongolia, is referred to by 
 Grimm in his Notes (vol. i. p. 112) as occurring 
 in the Thousand and One Days under the title 
 of ' Turandot.' 
 
 RUSSIA. ' Kinkach Martinko.' Conies de Pay sans et 
 des Patres Slaves, pp. 341-347. Alexandra 
 
242 APPENDIX 
 
 Chodzko. Paris (1864). Cosquin refers to a 
 Lithuanian variant in Schleicher, p. 56. 
 
 SPAIN. ' What Ana saw in the Sunbeam.' Patranas, 
 p. 181. R. H. Busk (1870). 
 
 SWEDEN. 
 
 (Upland.) < The Girl who could Spin Gold from 
 Clay and Long Straw/ Yule-Tide Stories, p. 168. 
 Benjamin Thorpe (1888). Both Cosquin and 
 Grimm refer to Cavallius, No. 10. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abipone name-superstition, 82, 
 83. 
 
 name-avoidance of the 
 
 dead, 171. 
 
 Abracadabra, 224. 
 
 Abyssinian baptism - customs, 
 92. 
 
 Achren, battle of, 50. 
 
 Adonai, 190. 
 
 Africa, name-giving in, 100. 
 name-superstition in, 81. 
 
 woman as farmer in, 37. 
 
 Aino name-customs, 101. 
 
 Amenti, 205, 215. 
 
 American Indians, name-avoid- 
 ance among, 170, 171. 
 
 name-giving, 95, 
 96. 
 
 - name-superstition, 
 82, 84. 
 
 taboo - customs, 
 116. 
 
 Amulets, 64, 208, 213. 
 
 Animals, cajolery of, 126, 129. 
 
 flesh of, eaten to acquire 
 
 qualities, 69. 
 
 Arachne, 42. 
 Astrology, 97. 
 Athene, 42. 
 
 Aubrey, 34, 89. 
 AUM, 189, 201. 
 Australians, name - giving 
 
 among, 100. 
 
 name-superstition, 81, 
 
 167. 
 
 sorcerers among the, 60. 
 
 taboo-customs, 117. 
 
 B 
 
 Babylonian psalms, 178. 
 Banks Island taboo-customs, 
 
 116. 
 Baptism, pagan origin of, 110- 
 
 112. 
 
 with spittle, 75. 
 Baptismal name, importance of, 
 
 89, 91. 
 Barbaric ideas about blood, 58 ; 
 
 death and disease, 134, 224 ; 
 
 names, 53. 
 Basque variant of Tom Tit Tot, 
 
 21. 
 
 Bear, flattery of, 126. 
 Beauty and the Beast, 2, 120. 
 Becke, Louis, 130, 171. 
 Berchta, 43, 44. 
 Bible, name-giving in the, 101, 
 
 139. 
 
 243 
 
244 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Blood - brotherhood, 71, 143, 
 
 146. 
 
 charms, 141. 
 
 relationship, 142. 
 
 through mother, 39. 
 
 Boat, sacred, of Osiris, 206. 
 Book of the Dead, 184, 205. 
 Bouda, 92. 
 
 Bourke, Captain, 85, 115. 
 Boys dressed as girls, 131. 
 Brand, 59, 75, 77, 91, 92, 215, 
 
 220. 
 Bride not to be struck with 
 
 iron, 25. 
 
 Britain, New, sorcerers, GO. 
 Breath as soul, 233. 
 Browne, Sir T., (52. 
 Budge, Dr. Wallis, 180, 198, 
 
 207, 233. 
 
 Building-sacrifice, 80. 
 Burne, Miss, 219. 
 
 Cabalistic writing, 213, 214. 
 Callaway, Bishop, G2, 222. 
 Cannibalism, 69. 
 Chaldean magic, 65, 18- 
 Changelings, 90. 
 Charms against thieves, 212. 
 
 for rain, 67. 
 
 horse-shoe, ;s-l. 
 
 image, 65. 
 
 moon-shaped, 64. 
 
 saliva, 72-77. 
 
 Chiefs, hidden names of, 158. 
 China, hidden names of Em- 
 peror of, 157. 
 Chinese doctors, 62. 
 Cinderella variants, 28. 
 Codrington, Mr., 59, 116. 
 
 Columbia, British, name-super- 
 stition in, 82. 
 
 Comte, 99. 
 
 Confucius, 190. 
 
 Cook, Captain, 145. 
 
 Corn-goddesses, 41. 
 
 Corp Creidh, 66. 
 
 Cox, Miss Roalfe, 28. 
 
 Sir G. W., 36. 
 
 Cradle safeguards, 92, 223. 
 
 Creative words, 194-198. 
 
 Crooke, W., 35, 95, 175. 
 
 Cure-charms, 216-227. 
 
 Curses, 199, 212. 
 
 Customs, naming-, 100-103. 
 
 saliva-, 75, 76. 
 
 Cyclades naming-customs, 94. 
 
 Czar, prayer buried with, 
 215. 
 
 D 
 
 Dahomey, hidden name of king 
 
 of, 160. 
 
 David Copperfickl, 67. 
 Dead, spells for raising the, 210. 
 
 taboo on names of, 16 1- 
 
 172. 
 Death, barbaric theory <>; 
 
 224. 
 
 euphemisms to avert, 
 
 | 125, 135, 138. 
 Deity and names of mortals, 
 
 138, 179. 
 
 Demeter, 41, 42, 163. 
 Devil, gullibility of, 47-5:. 
 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 63. 
 Di Indigetes, 177. 
 Dionysus, 70. 
 Disease, barbaric theory of, 134, 
 
 224. 
 
INDEX 
 
 245 
 
 Disease, euphemisms to avert, 
 
 125, 134. 
 
 Donegal, superstition in 35. 
 Dorman, 66, 69, 78, 168. 
 Dreams, 210. 
 Dubois, Abbe, 201, 203. 
 Dust-storms, superstition about, 
 
 36. 
 
 E 
 
 Earth-mother, 42. 
 
 Eastern variant of Tom Tit Tot, 
 
 23. 
 
 Effigy, name on, 65. 
 Elworthy, F. T., 77, 132, 214. 
 Endor, Witch of, 210. 
 Euphemisms, 125. 
 Evil Eye, charms against, 74, 
 
 131, 133, 213, 214. 
 Excalibur, 35. 
 Exorcists, modern, 228. 
 
 Fairies, euphemism for, 129. 
 Farmer, woman as, 37, 38. 
 Fates, the, 42, 43. 
 Fathers-in-law, taboo between, 
 
 and sons-in-law, 115-117, 123. 
 Fitz-Gerald, Edward, 198. 
 Flamen Dialis, 153. 
 Flaminica, 154. 
 Flax-goddesses, 43, 44. 
 Flowers, exorcising demon from, 
 
 229. 
 
 Folk-medicine, 61, 62, 218-224. 
 Fox, flattery of, 128. 
 Frazer, J. G., 45, 58, 70, 147, 
 
 150. 
 Friend, Rev. Hilderic, 137. 
 
 Funeral games, 4. 
 Furies, the, 129. 
 
 G 
 
 Games, antiquity of, 3. 
 Genesis Creation-legend, 198. 
 Giant with no heart in his body, 
 
 2,5. 
 
 Gnostic amulets, 213. 
 God, eating the, 70. 
 Goddesses, corn, 41. 
 earth, 42. 
 
 hearth, 42. 
 
 spinning, 42. 
 
 Gods, incarnate, 151. 
 
 avoidance of names of, 173, 
 
 177. 
 
 of healing, 216. 
 
 wind and weather, 155. 
 
 writing, 199. 
 
 Golden Bough, 45, 58, 70, 147, 
 
 150. 
 
 Goose Girl, 141. 
 Gregor, Dr. W., 83, 91. 
 Grimm, 29, 41, 44, 49, 52, 199, 
 
 218. 
 
 Groome, F. Hindes, 8, 29. 
 Guiana, Indians of, 81, lll(n.). 
 Gullible Devil, 47-52. 
 
 H 
 
 Hair - cuttings, precautions 
 
 about, 57, 59. 
 Hale, Sir Matthew, 226. 
 Hall of the Two Truths, 207. 
 Healing, gods of, 216. 
 Heart-shaped amulets, 215. 
 Hearth goddesses, 42. 
 Herodotus, 38, 191. 
 
246 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Herrick, 45. 
 
 Hidden names of chiefs and 
 
 kings, 157-160. 
 
 of priests, 163. 
 Hindus, 35, 86, 133. 
 Holda, 43. 
 Honovar, 197. 
 Horse-shoes as charms, 34. 
 House, taboo on chief or priest 
 
 entering, 153. 
 
 Idylls of the King, 1. 
 Images, charm through, 65. 
 Incantations, 211, 221, 227. 
 Incarnate gods, 151. 
 Incarnation of priest-king, 147. 
 Indigitamenta, 177. 
 Initiation rites, 103, 146. 
 Irish name-superstition, 83. 
 Iron, superstitions about, 25, 
 
 33-36, 94. 
 Ishtar, 185. 
 Isis and Ra, 180-184. 
 
 Jehovah, 190. 
 
 Jesus, legends of, and secret 
 
 names of God, 187, 188. 
 
 as exorcist, 228. 
 
 as healer, 219. 
 
 name of, as cure-charm, 
 
 221. 
 
 Jevons, Dr., 63, 153, 178. 
 Jews, name-taboo among the, 
 
 129. 
 
 Jinn, 36, 186. 
 Johnson, Dr., 66. 
 
 Joseph, name of, as cure- 
 charm, 221. 
 Joukahainen, 217. 
 
 K 
 
 | Ka, the Egyptian, 65, 232. 
 | Kaffir taboo-custom, 119. 
 
 Kalevala, 126, 217. 
 
 Karakia, 200. 
 
 King's evil, 157. 
 
 Kings, hidden names of, 157- 
 160. 
 
 Kingsley, Miss Mary, 57, 103, 
 225. 
 
 Kols of India, 35. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 29, 62, 68, 91, 
 
 218. 
 
 Language, concrete terms in, 55. 
 Logos, 196. 
 
 Lustration with spittle, 75. 
 Lyall, Sir Alfred, 193. 
 
 Macbeth, 208. 
 Magic, 54, 185. 
 
 sympathetic, 45, 59-68, 93. 
 
 through intangible things, 
 79-113. 
 
 through tangible things, 
 
 57-78. 
 
 Maine, Sir Henry, 142. 
 
 Man and devil, bargains be- 
 tween, 47, 50. 
 
 Manlii, 101. 
 
 Mantrams, 198, 200-204. 
 
 Maori naming-custom, 74. 
 
 Marriage-taboo, 122, 123. 
 
INDEX 
 
 247 
 
 Mary, name of, as cure-charm, 
 
 221, 224. 
 
 Masai saliva-ciistom, 74. 
 ' Mawther,' derivation of, 9. 
 Medicine, folk-, 61, 62, 222, 228. 
 Melanesians, 63. 
 Mexican pontiff, 152. 
 Midwives and mantrams, 223. 
 Mikado, 151. 
 Moon-charms, 64. 
 Moslem, secret name of deity, 
 
 185, 189. 
 Mothers-in-law, taboo between, 
 
 and sons-in-law, 115-117, 123. 
 Miiller, Professor Max, 36. 
 Mummy as medicine, 62. 
 
 incisions in, 33. 
 
 Mystery plays, 1, 90. 
 
 N 
 
 Nail-parings, precautions about, 
 57. 
 
 Name equated with soul, 231- 
 237. 
 
 Name-giving with spittle, 75. 
 
 Names, avoidance of, 117. 
 baptismal, 89, 91. 
 
 barbaric ideas about, 57. 
 
 change of, 103, 125. 
 
 on effigy, 65. 
 
 on mummy, 215. 
 
 unlucky, 118. 
 
 Naming-customs, 100-103. 
 
 ' Naming ' a Member of Parlia- 
 ment, 106 (n.). 
 
 Neith, the goddess, 43. 
 
 Norns, 43. 
 
 O 
 
 Odysseus, 216. 
 Olaf, king, 48. 
 
 OM, 189, 201. 
 
 ' Om Mani padme hum,' 200. 
 
 'Open Sesame,' 205. 
 
 Origin and diffusion of stories, 
 
 28-31. 
 Osiris (the god), 191, 207. 
 
 (the mummy), 205, 215 
 
 Palestine, woman as farmer in, 
 
 28. 
 
 Paton, W. R., 163. 
 Pausanias, 131, 153. 
 Pearson, Karl, 40, 45. 
 Penelope, 25, 37. 
 Phylacteries, 213. 
 Plutarch, 63, 64, 155, 174. 
 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 106 (n.). 
 Portraits, superstitions about, 
 
 77. 
 
 Powell, Professor York, 199. 
 Praise of children deprecated, 
 
 131. 
 
 Praying- wheels, 200. 
 Priesthood, origin of the, 110. 
 Priest-king, incarnated, 147. 
 Problem of marriage-taboo, 122- 
 
 124. 
 of origin and diffusion of 
 
 stories, 28-31. 
 Proverbs, Book of, 195. 
 Punch and Judy. 51. 
 
 Ra and Isis, 180-184. 
 
 Rain-charm, 67. 
 
 Relations, taboo between, 113- 
 
 119. 
 Relics as charms, 72. 
 
248 
 
 INDEX 
 
 REN (or name), Egyptian theory 
 
 of, 233. 
 
 Rex Nemorensis, 148. 
 Rhys, Professor, 25, 50, 235 
 
 237. 
 
 Rome, tutelary deity of, 174. 
 Rumpelstiltskin, 28. 
 
 S 
 
 Sacrifice to earth-spirit, 80. 
 
 Saliva-superstitions, 72-77. 
 
 Salutations, luck in, 132. 
 
 Samoan high priest, 152. 
 
 Sayce, Professor, 178. 
 
 Scot, Reginald, 208, 212. 
 
 Scotch belief in unlucky names 
 119. 
 
 variant of Tom Tit Tot, 
 18. 
 
 Seals or signatures, doctrine of 
 61. 
 
 Shadow, magic through, 79, 80. 
 
 Shropshire Folk-Lore, 219. 
 
 Simpson, William, 94, 157. 
 Singhalese name-giving, 96. 
 Smith, Professor Robertson, 71 
 
 111. 
 
 Social groups, early, 40. 
 Solomon, seal-ring of, 186. 
 Songs of healing, 216. 
 Sortes BiUicce, 215. 
 
 Homericce, 215. 
 
 Virgiliance, 215. 
 
 Soul, barbaric theories of, 6. 
 and civilised theories 
 
 of, 233. 
 
 - equated with name, 231- 
 
 237. 
 
 Speech as divine, 194-196. 
 Spells, 208. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 6, 144. 
 Spindle-whorls, 39. 
 Spinning-goddesses, 42. 
 Spinster, woman as, 36, 41. 
 Spirits, spells for summoning 
 
 209. 
 Sprinkling of horses at Siena 
 
 113. 
 
 Stephen, Leslie, 1. 
 Stone implements, survival of 
 
 use of, 33. 
 Stories, problem of origin and 
 
 diffusion of, 28-31. 
 Superstitions, persistence of 
 
 107-109. 
 Sympathetic magic, 45, 59-68 
 
 93. 
 
 powder, 63. 
 
 Taboo, 114-191. 
 
 - between relatives, 115. 
 
 - on name of gods, 173. 
 
 kings and priests, 147. 
 
 the dead, 164. 
 
 Tasmanian name-customs 81 
 
 169. 
 
 "eeth, precautions about, 58. 
 "heocritus, 74. 
 'hief, charm against, 212. 
 'horpe, Benjamin, 52, 127. 
 Thoth, 199. 
 Thracians, 38. 
 Toldoth Jcshu, 186. 
 Tom Tit Tot, story of, 9-16. 
 variants of, 17-26. 
 Toothache cure-charms, 220. 
 Towndey Plays, 90. 
 Transubstantiation, 70. 
 Tree-spirit, incarnation of, 150. 
 Trepanning skull, 229. 
 
INDEX 
 
 249 
 
 Trinidad name-superstition, 87. 
 Trit-a-Trot, 28. 
 Trwtyn-Tratyn, 27. 
 Turgot, 108. 
 
 Tylor, Professor, 69, 122-124. 
 Tyrolese variant of Tom Tit 
 Tot, 20. 
 
 Vac, 194, 196. 
 Vedas, 195, 201. 
 Vox Stellarum, 97. 
 
 W 
 
 Wainamoinen, 127, 217. 
 
 Walpurg, 44. 
 
 Warts, remedy for, 62. 
 
 Water-worship, 111. 
 
 Welsh variants of Tom Tit Tot, 
 
 24, 27. 
 Whooping-cough, remedy for, 
 
 221. 
 
 Whuppity Stoorie, 18, 72. 
 Wiedemann, 184, 205, 233. 
 
 Wind and weather gods, 155. 
 
 Winifred's well, Saint, 113. 
 
 Wisdom, 195. 
 
 Witch, 46, 225. 
 
 Witchcraft, Discoverie of, 208, 
 
 212. 
 
 Withershins, 204 (n.). 
 Woden as healer, 219. 
 Woman as farmer and spinster, 
 
 36-41. 
 Wood-chewing to soften heart, 
 
 61. 
 
 Words of power, 192-230. 
 Writing, god of, 199. 
 
 Yahweh, 190. 
 Yeats, W. B., 83. 
 Yellow Sky, story of, 168. 
 
 Zarathushtra (Zoroaster), 197. 
 Zulu sorcerers, 59, 62. 
 taboo-customs, 117. 
 
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