Chapter no 49

CHAPTER 4

THE EXTERNAL SOUL

i

THE reader may remember that the preceding account of firefestivals was suggested by the myth of the Norse god Balder, who is said to have been slain by a branch of mistletoe and burnt in a great fire. We have now to enquire how far the customs which have been passed in review help to shed light on the myth. In this enquiry it may be convenient to begin with the mistletoe, the instrument of Balder’s death.

Relation of the fire-festivals to the myth of Balder.

From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of superstitious veneration in Europe. It was worshipped by the Druids, as we learn from a famous passage of Pliny. After enumerating the different kinds of mistletoe, he proceeds: ‘In treating of this subject, the admiration in which the mistletoe is held throughout Gaul ought not to pass unnoticed. The Druids, for so they call their wizards, esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree on which it grows, provided only that the tree is an oak. But apart from this they choose oak-woods for their sacred groves and perform no sacred rites without oak-leaves; so that the very name of Druids may be regarded as a Greek appellation derived from their worship of the oak. For they believe that whatever grows on these trees is sent from heaven, and is a sign that the tree has been chosen by the god himself. The mistletoe is very rarely to be met with; but when it is found, they gather it with solemn ceremony. This they do above all on the sixth day of the moon, from whence they date the beginnings of their months, of their years, and of their thirty years’ cycle, because by the sixth day the moon has plenty of vigour and has not run half its course. After due preparations have been made for a sacrifice and a feast under the tree, they hail it as the universal healer and bring to the spot two white bulls, whose horns have never been bound

before. A priest clad in a white robe climbs the tree and with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloth. Then they sacrifice the victims, praying that God may make his own gift to prosper with those upon whom he has bestowed it. They believe that a potion prepared from mistletoe will make barren animal to bring forth, and that the plant is a remedy against all poison. So much of men’s religion is commonly concerned with trifles.’*

Veneration of the Druids for the mistletoe.

In another passage Pliny tells us that in medicine the mistletoe which grows on an oak was esteemed the most efficacious, and that its efficacy was by some superstitious people supposed to be increased if the plant was gathered on the first day of the moon without the use of iron, and if when gathered it was not allowed to touch the earth; oak-mistletoe thus obtained was deemed a cure for epilepsy; carried about by women it assisted them to conceive; and it healed ulcers most effectually, if only the sufferer chewed a piece of the plant and laid another piece on the sore. Yet, again, he says that mistletoe was supposed, like vinegar and an egg, to be an excellent means of extinguishing a fire.

Medical and magical virtues ascribed to mistletoe in ancient

Italy.

If in these latter passages Pliny refers, as he apparently does, to the beliefs current among his contemporaries in Italy, it will follow that the Druids and the Italians were to some extent agreed as to the valuable properties possessed by mistletoe which grows on an oak; both of them deemed it an effectual remedy for a number of ailments, and both of them ascribed to it a quickening virtue, the Druids believing that a potion prepared from mistletoe would fertilize barren cattle, and the Italians holding that a piece of mistletoe carried about by a woman would help her to conceive a child. Further, both peoples thought that if the plant were to exert its medicinal properties it must be gathered in a certain way and at a certain time. It might not be cut with iron, hence the Druids cut it with gold; and it might not touch the earth, hence the Druids caught it in a white cloth.

In choosing the time for gathering the plant, both peoples were determined by observation of the moon; only they differed as to the particular day of the moon, the Italians preferring the first, and the Druids the sixth.

Agreement between the Druids and the ancient Italians as to the

valuable properties of mistletoe.

But the favourite time would seem to be Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day. We have seen that both in France and Sweden special virtues are ascribed to mistletoe gathered at Midsummer. The rule in Sweden is that ‘mistletoe must be cut on the night of Midsummer Eve when sun and moon stand in the sign of their might’. Again, in Wales it was believed that a sprig of mistletoe gathered on St John’s Eve (Midsummer Eve), or at any time before the berries appeared, would induce dreams of omen, both good and bad, if it were placed under the pillow of the sleeper.

Thus mistletoe is one of the many plants whose magical or medicinal virtues are believed to culminate with the culmination of the sun on the longest day of the year. Hence it seems reasonable to conjecture that in the eyes of the Druids, also, who revered the plant so highly, the sacred mistletoe may have acquired a double portion of its mystic qualities at the solstice in June, and that accordingly they may have regularly cut it with solemn ceremony on Midsummer Eve.

Be that as it may, certain it is that the mistletoe, the instrument of Balder’s death, has been regularly gathered for the sake of its mystic qualities on Midsummer Eve in Scandinavia, Balder’s home. The plant is found commonly growing on pear-trees, oaks, and other trees in thick damp woods throughout the more temperate parts of Sweden. Thus one of the two main incidents of Balder’s myth is reproduced in the great midsummer festival of Scandinavia. But the other main incident of the myth, the burning of Balder’s body on a pyre, has also its counterpart in the bonfires which still blaze, or blazed till lately, in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden on Midsummer Eve. It does not appear, indeed, that any effigy is burned in these bonfires; but the burning of an effigy is a feature which might easily drop out after its meaning was forgotten. And the name of Balder’s balefires (Balder’s Bǎlar), by which these midsummer fires were formerly known in Sweden, puts their connexion with Balder beyond the reach of

doubt, and makes it probable that in former times either a living representative or an effigy of Balder was annually burned in them.

Midsummer was the season sacred to Balder, and the Swedish poet Tegner, in placing the burning of Balder at midsummer, may very well have followed an old tradition that the summer solstice was the time when the good god came to his untimely end.

The two main incidents of Balder’s myth, namely the pulling of

the mistletoe and the lighting of the bonfire, are reproduced in

the great Midsummer celebration of Scandinavia.

Thus it has been shewn that the leading incidents of the Balder myth have their counterparts in those fire-festivals of our European peasantry which undoubtedly date from a time long prior to the introduction of Christianity. The pretence of throwing the victim chosen by lot into the Beltane fire, and the similar treatment of the man, the future Green Wolf, at the midsummer bonfire in Normandy,* may naturally be interpreted as traces of an older custom of actually burning human beings on these occasions; and the green dress of the Green Wolf, coupled with the leafy envelope of the young fellow who trod out the midsummer fire at Moosheim, seems to hint that the persons who perished at these festivals did so in the character of tree-spirits or deities of vegetation. From all this we may reasonably infer that in the Balder myth on the one hand, and the fire-festivals and custom of gathering mistletoe on the other hand, we have, as it were, the two broken and dissevered halves of an original whole. In other words, we may assume with some degree of probability that the myth of Balder’s death was not merely a myth, that is, a description of physical phenomena in imagery borrowed from human life, but that it was at the same time the story which people told to explain why they annually burned a human representative of the god and cut the mistletoe with solemn ceremony. If I am right, the story of Balder’s tragic end formed, so to say, the text of the sacred drama which was acted year by year as a magical rite to cause the sun to shine, trees to grow, crops to thrive, and to guard man and beast from the baleful arts of fairies and trolls, of witches and warlocks.

The tale belonged, in short, to that class of nature myths which are meant to

be supplemented by ritual; here, as so often, myth stood to magic in the relation of theory to practice.

Hence the myth of Balder was probably the explanation given of

the similar rite.

But if the victims—the human Balders—who died by fire, whether in spring or at midsummer, were put to death as living embodiments of tree- spirits or deities of vegetation, it would seem that Balder himself must have been a tree-spirit or deity of vegetation. It becomes desirable, therefore, to determine, if we can, the particular kind of tree or trees, of which a personal representative was burned at the fire-festivals. For we may be quite sure that it was not as a representative of vegetation in general that the victim suffered death. The idea of vegetation in general is too abstract to be primitive. Most probably the victim at first represented a particular kind of sacred tree. Now of all European trees none has such claims as the oak to be considered as pre-eminently the sacred tree of the Aryans. Its worship is attested for all the great branches of the Aryan stock in Europe. According to Grimm, the oak ranked first among the holy trees of the Germans. It is certainly known to have been adored by them in the age of heathendom, and traces of its worship have survived in various parts of Germany almost to the present day. Among the ancient Italians the oak was sacred above all other trees. We may certainly conclude that this tree was venerated by the Aryans in common before the dispersion; and that their primitive home must have lain in a land which was clothed with forests of oak.

If a human representative of a tree-spirit was burned in the

bonfires, what kind of tree did he represent?

The oak the principal sacred tree of the Aryans.

Now, considering the primitive character and remarkable similarity of the fire-festivals observed by all the branches of the Aryan race in Europe, we may infer that these festivals form part of the common stock of religious observances which the various peoples carried with them in their wanderings from their old home. But, if I am right, an essential feature of those primitive fire-festivals was the burning of a man who represented the

tree-spirit. In view, then, of the place occupied by the oak in the religion of the Aryans, the presumption is that the tree so represented at the fire- festivals must originally have been the oak. Now it is sometimes required that the need-fire, or other sacred fire, should be made by the friction of a particular kind of wood; and when the kind of wood is prescribed, whether among Celts, Germans, or Slavs, that wood appears to be generally the oak.

Now, if the sacred fire was regularly kindled by the friction of oak-wood, we may infer that originally the fire was also fed with the same material. In point of fact, it appears that the perpetual fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with oak-wood. At the Boeotian festival of the Daedala, the analogy of which to the spring and midsummer festivals of modern Europe has been already pointed out,* the great feature was the felling and burning of an oak. The general conclusion is, that at those periodic or occasional ceremonies the ancient Aryans both kindled and fed the fire with the sacred oak-wood.

Hence the tree represented by the human victim who was burnt

at the fire-festivals was probably the oak.

But if at these solemn rites the fire was regularly made of oak-wood, it follows that any man who was burned in it as a personification of the tree- spirit could have represented no tree but the oak. The sacred oak was thus burned in duplicate; the wood of the tree was consumed in the fire, and along with it was consumed a living man as a personification of the oak- spirit. The conclusion thus drawn for the European Aryans in general is confirmed in its special application to the Scandinavians by the relation in which amongst them the mistletoe appears to have stood to the burning of the victim in the midsummer fire. We have seen that among Scandinavians it has been customary to gather the mistletoe at midsummer. But so far as appears on the face of this custom, there is nothing to connect it with the midsummer fires in which human victims or effigies of them were burned.

Even if the fire, as seems probable, was originally always made with oak- wood, why should it have been necessary to pull the mistletoe? The last link between the midsummer customs of gathering the mistletoe and lighting the bonfires is supplied by Balder’s myth, which can hardly be disjoined from the customs in question. The myth suggests that a vital connexion may once

have been believed to subsist between the mistletoe and the human representative of the oak who was burned in the fire. According to the myth, Balder could be killed by nothing in heaven or earth except the mistletoe; and so long as the mistletoe remained on the oak, he was not only immortal but invulnerable. Now, if we suppose that Balder was the oak, the origin of the myth becomes intelligible. The mistletoe was viewed as the seat of life of the oak, and so long as it was uninjured nothing could kill or even wound the oak. The conception of the mistletoe as the seat of life of the oak would naturally be suggested to primitive people by the observation that while the oak is deciduous, the mistletoe which grows on it is evergreen. In winter the sight of its fresh foliage among the bare branches must have been hailed by the worshippers of the tree as a sign that the divine life which had ceased to animate the branches yet survived in the mistletoe, as the heart of a sleeper still beats when his body is motionless.

Hence when the god had to be killed—when the sacred tree had to be burnt —it was necessary to begin by breaking of the mistletoe. For so long as the mistletoe remained intact, the oak (so people might think) was invulnerable; all the blows of their knives and axes would glance harmless from its surface. But once tear from the oak its sacred heart—the mistletoe—and the tree nodded to its fall. And when in later times the spirit of the oak came to be represented by a living man, it was logically necessary to suppose that, like the tree he personated, he could neither be killed nor wounded so long as the mistletoe remained uninjured. The pulling of the mistletoe was thus at once the signal and the cause of his death.

If the human victims burnt at the fire-festival represented the

oak, the reason for pulling the mistletoe may have been a belief

that the life of the oak was in the mistletoe, and that the tree

could not perish either by fire or water so long as the mistletoe

remained intact among its boughs

But since the idea of a being whose life is thus, in a sense, outside himself, must be strange to many readers, and has, indeed, not yet been recognized in its full bearing on primitive superstition, it will be worth while to illustrate it by examples drawn both from story and custom. The result will be to shew that, in assuming this idea as the explanation of

Balder’s relation to the mistletoe, I assume a principle which is deeply engraved on the mind of primitive man.

Conception of a being whose life is outside himself.

ii

In a former part of this work we saw that, in the opinion of primitive people, the soul may temporarily absent itself from the body without causing death.* Such temporary absences of the soul are often believed to involve considerable risk, since the wandering soul is liable to a variety of mishaps at the hands of enemies, and so forth. But there is another aspect to this power of disengaging the soul from the body. If only the safety of the soul can be ensured during its absence, there is no reason why the soul should not continue absent for an indefinite time; indeed a man may, on a pure calculation of personal safety, desire that his soul should never return to his body. Unable to conceive of life abstractly as a ‘permanent possibility of sensation’ or a ‘continuous adjustment of internal arrangements to external relations’, the savage thinks of it as a concrete material thing of a definite bulk, capable of being seen and handled, kept in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised, fractured, or smashed in pieces. It is not needful that the life, so conceived, should be in the man; it may be absent from his body and still continue to animate him by virtue of a sort of sympathy or action at a distance. So long as this object which he calls his life or soul remains unharmed, the man is well; if it is injured, he suffers; if it is destroyed, he dies. Or, to put it otherwise, when a man is ill or dies, the fact is explained by saying that the material object called his life or soul, whether it be in his body or out of it, has either sustained injury or been destroyed. But there may be circumstances in which, if the life or soul remains in the man, it stands a greater chance of sustaining injury than if it were stowed away in some safe and secret place. Accordingly, in such circumstances, primitive man takes his soul out of his body and deposits it for security in some snug spot, intending to replace it in his body when the danger is past. Or if he should discover some place of absolute security, he may be content to leave his soul there permanently. The advantage of this is that, so long as the soul

remains unharmed in the place where he has deposited it, the man himself is immortal; nothing can kill his body, since his life is not in it.

Belief that a man’s soul may be deposited for safety in a secure

place outside his body, and that so long as it remains there intact

he himself is invulnerable and immortal.

Evidence of this primitive belief is furnished by a class of folk-tales of which the Norse story of ‘The giant who had no heart in his body’ is perhaps the best-known example. Stories of this kind are widely diffused over the world, and from their number and the variety of incident and of details in which the leading idea is embodied, we may infer that the conception of an external soul is one which has had a powerful hold on the minds of men at an early stage of history.

This belief is illustrated by folk-tales told by many peoples.

In the first place, the story of the external soul is told, in various forms, by all Aryan peoples from Hindoostan to the Hebrides. A very common form of it is this: A warlock, giant, or other fairyland being is invulnerable and immortal because he keeps his soul hidden far away in some secret place; but a fair princess, whom he holds enthralled in his enchanted castle, wiles his secret from him and reveals it to the hero, who seeks out the warlock’s soul, heart, life, or death (as it is variously called), and, by destroying it, simultaneously kills the warlock. Thus a Hindoo story tells how a magician called Punchkin held a queen captive for twelve years, and would fain marry her, but she would not have him. At last the queen’s son came to rescue her, and the two plotted together to kill Punchkin. So the queen spoke the magician fair, and pretended that she had at last made up her mind to marry him. ‘And do tell me,’ she said, ‘are you quite immortal?

Can death never touch you? And are you too great an enchanter ever to feel human suffering?’ ‘It is true’, he said, ‘that I am not as others. Far, far away, hundreds of thousands of miles from this, there lies a desolate country covered with thick jungle. In the midst of the jungle grows a circle of palm trees, and in the centre of the circle stand six chattees full of water, piled one above another: below the sixth chattee is a small cage, which contains a

little green parrot;—on the life of the parrot depends my life;—and if the parrot is killed I must die. It is, however,’ he added, ‘impossible that the parrot should sustain any injury, both on account of the inaccessibility of the country, and because, by my appointment, many thousand genii surround the palm trees, and kill all who approach the place.’ But the queen’s young son overcame all difficulties, and got possession of the parrot. He brought it to the door of the magician’s palace, and began playing with it. Punchkin, the magician, saw him, and, coming out, tried to persuade the boy to give him the parrot. ‘Give me my parrot!’ cried Punchkin. Then the boy took hold of the parrot and tore off one of his wings; and as he did so the magician’s right arm fell off. Punchkin then stretched out his left arm, crying, ‘Give me my parrot!’ The prince pulled off the parrot’s second wing, and, the magician’s left arm tumbled off.

‘Give me my parrot!’ cried he, and fell on his knees. The prince pulled off the parrot’s right leg, the magician’s right leg fell off; the prince pulled off the parrot’s left leg, down fell the magician’s left. Nothing remained of him except the trunk and the head; but still he rolled his eyes, and cried, ‘Give me my parrot!’ ‘Take your parrot, then,’ cried the boy; and with that he wrung the bird’s neck, and threw it at the magician; and, as he did so, Punchkin’s head twisted round, and, with a fearful groan, he died!*

Stories of an external soul common among Aryan peoples.

The external soul in Hindoo stories. Punchkin and the parrot.

In a Siamese or Cambodian story, probably derived from India, we are told that Thossakan or Ravana, the King of Ceylon, was able by magic art to take his soul out of his body and leave it in a box at home, while he went to the wars. Thus he was invulnerable in battle. When he was about to give battle to Rama, he deposited his soul with a hermit called Fire-eye, who was to keep it safe for him. So in the fight Rama was astounded to see that his arrows struck the king without wounding him. But one of Rama’s allies, knowing the secret of the king’s invulnerability, transformed himself by magic into the likeness of the king, and going to the hermit asked back his soul. On receiving it he soared up into the air and flew to Rama, brandishing the box and squeezing it so hard that all the breath left the King of Ceylon’s body, and he died. In a Bengalee story a prince going into a far

country planted with his own hands a tree in the courtyard of his father’s palace, and said to his parents, ‘This tree is my life. When you see the tree green and fresh, then know that it is well with me; when you see the tree fade in some parts, then know that I am in an ill case; and when you see the whole tree fade, then know that I am dead and gone.’ In another Indian tale a prince, setting forth on his travels, left behind him a barley plant, with instructions that it should be carefully tended and watched; for if it flourished, he would be alive and well, but if it drooped, then some mischance was about to happen to him. And so it fell out. For the prince was beheaded, and as his head rolled off, the barley plant snapped in two and the ear of barley fell to the ground. In the legend of the origin of Gilgit there figures a fairy king whose soul is in the snows and who can only perish by fire.

The external soul in a Siamese or Cambodian Story.

Indian stories of a tree and a barley plant that were life-tokens.

In Greek tales, ancient and modern, the idea of an external soul is not uncommon. When Meleager* was seven days old, the Fates appeared to his mother and told her that Meleager would die when the brand which was blazing on the hearth had burnt down. So his mother snatched the brand from the fire and kept it in a box. But in after-years, being enraged at her son for slaying her brothers, she burnt the brand in the fire and Meleager expired in agonies, as if flames were preying on his vitals. Again, Nisus King of Megara had a purple or golden hair on the middle of his head, and it was fated that whenever the hair was pulled out the king should die.

When Megara was besieged by the Cretans, the king’s daughter Scylla fell in love with Minos, their king, and pulled out the fatal hair from her father’s head. So he died. Similarly Poseidon made Pterelaus immortal by giving him a golden hair on his head. But when Taphos, the home of Pterelaus, was besieged by Amphitryo, the daughter of Pterelaus fell in love with Amphitryo and killed her father by plucking out the golden hair with which his life was bound up. In a modern Greek folk-tale a man’s strength lies in three golden hairs on his head. When his mother pulls them out, he grows weak and timid and is slain by his enemies.

 The external soul in Greek stories. Meleager and the firebrand.

Nisus and his purple or golden hair.

Pterelaus and his golden hair.

Mordern Greek parallels.

Ancient Italian legend furnishes a close parallel to the Greek story of Meleager. Silvia, the young wife of Septimius Marcellus, had a child by the god Mars. The god gave her a spear, with which he said that the fate of the child would be bound up. When the boy grew up he quarrelled with his maternal uncles and slew them. So in revenge his mother burned the spear on which his life depended.* In one of the stories of the Pentamerone a certain queen has a twin brother, a dragon. The astrologers declared at her birth that she would live just as long as the dragon and no longer, the death of the one involving the death of the other. If the dragon were killed, the only way to restore the queen to life would be to smear her temples, breast, pulses, and nostrils with the blood of the dragon.

The external soul in Italian stories. Silvia’s son.

The dragon twin.

An Italian tale sets forth how a great cloud, which was really a fairy, used to receive a young girl as tribute every year from a certain city; and the inhabitants had to give the girls up, for if they did not, the cloud would throw things at them and kill them all. One year it fell to the lot of the king’s daughter to be handed over to the cloud, and they took her in procession, to the roll of muffled drums, and attended by her weeping father and mother, to the top of a mountain, and left her sitting in a chair there all alone. Then the fairy cloud came down on the top of the mountain, set the princess in her lap, and began to suck her blood out of her little finger; for it was on the blood of girls that this wicked fairy lived. When the poor princess was faint with the loss of blood and lay like a log, the cloud carried her away up to her fairy palace in the sky. But a brave youth had seen all that happened from behind a bush, and no sooner did the fairy spirit away the princess to her palace than he turned himself into an eagle and flew after them. He lighted on a tree just outside the palace, and looking in at the

window he beheld a room full of young girls all in bed; for these were the victims of former years whom the fairy cloud had half killed by sucking their blood; yet they called her mamma. When the fairy went away and left the girls, the brave young man had food drawn up for them by ropes, and he told them to ask the fairy how she might be killed and what was to become of them when she died. It was a delicate question, but the fairy answered it, saying, ‘I shall never die.’ However, when the girls pressed her, she took them out on a terrace and said, ‘Do you see that mountain far off there? On that mountain is a tigress with seven heads. If you wish me to die, a lion must fight that tigress and tear off all seven of her heads. In her body is an egg, and if any one hits me with it in the middle of my forehead, I shall die; but if that egg falls into my hands, the tigress will come to life again, resume her seven heads, and I shall live.’ When the young girls heard this they pretended to be glad and said, ‘Good! certainly our mamma can never die,’ but naturally they were discouraged. However, when she went away again, they told it all to the young man, and he bade them have no fear.

Away he went to the mountain, turned himself into a lion, and fought the tigress. Meantime the fairy came home, saying, ‘Alas! I feel ill!’ For six days the fight went on, the young man tearing off one of the tigress’s heads each day, and each day the strength of the fairy kept ebbing away. Then after allowing himself two days’ rest the hero tore off the seventh head and secured the egg, but not till it had rolled into the sea and been brought back to him by a friendly dog-fish. When he returned to the fairy with the egg in his hand, she begged and prayed him to give it her, but he made her first restore the young girls to health and send them away in handsome carriages.

When she had done so, he struck her on the forehead with the egg, and she fell down dead.

Italian story of a wicked fairy whose death was in an egg.

Stories of the same sort are current among Slavonic peoples. In some of them, as in the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, the warlock is questioned by a treacherous woman as to the place where his strength resides or his life or death is stowed away; and his suspicions being roused by her curiosity, he at first puts her off with false answers, but is at last beguiled into telling her the truth, thereby incurring his doom through her

treachery. Thus a Russian story tells how a certain warlock called Kashtshei or Koshchei the Deathless carried off a princess and kept her prisoner in his golden castle. However, a prince made up to her one day as she was walking alone and disconsolate in the castle garden, and cheered by the prospect of escaping with him she went to the warlock and coaxed him with false and flattering words, saying, ‘My dearest friend, tell me, I pray you, will you never die?’ ‘Certainly not,’ says he. ‘Well,’ says she, ‘and where is your death? is it in your dwelling?’ ‘To be sure it is,’ says he, ‘it is in the broom under the threshold.’ Thereupon the princess seized the broom and threw it on the fire, but although the broom burned, the deathless Koshchei remained alive; indeed not so much as a hair of him was singed. Balked in her first attempt, the artful hussy pouted and said, ‘You do not love me true, for you have not told me where your death is; yet I am not angry, but love you with all my heart.’ With these fawning words she besought the warlock to tell her truly where his death was. So he laughed and said, ‘Why do you wish to know? Well then, out of love I will tell you where it lies. In a certain field there stand three green oaks, and under the roots of the largest oak is a worm, and if ever this worm is found and crushed, that instant I shall die.’ When the princess heard these words, she went straight to her lover and told him all; and he searched till he found the oaks and dug up the worm and crushed it. Then he hurried to the warlock’s castle, but only to learn from the princess that the warlock was still alive. Then she fell to wheedling and coaxing Koshchei once more, and this time, overcome by her wiles, he opened his heart to her and told her the truth. ‘My death,’ said he, ‘is far from here and hard to find, on the wide ocean. In that sea is an island, and on the island there grows a green oak, and beneath the oak is an iron chest, and in the chest is a small basket, and in the basket is a hare, and in the hare is a duck, and in the duck is an egg; and he who finds the egg and breaks it, kills me at the same time.’ The prince naturally procured the fateful egg and with it in his hands he confronted the deathless warlock.

The monster would have killed him, but the prince began to squeeze the egg. At that the warlock shrieked with pain, and turning to the false princess, who stood by smirking and smiling, ‘Was it not out of love for you,’ said he, ‘that I told you where my death was? And is this the return you make to me?’ With that he grabbed at his sword, which hung from a peg on the wall; but before he could reach it, the prince had crushed the

egg, and sure enough the deathless warlock found his death at the same moment.

The external soul in Slavonic stories.

Russian story of Koshchei the Deathless, whose death was in an

egg.

In another version of the same story, when the cunning warlock deceives the traitress by telling her that his death is in broom, she gilds the broom, and at supper the warlock sees it shining under the threshold and asks her sharply, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh,’ says she, ‘you see how I honour you.’ ‘Simpleton!’ says he, ‘I was joking. My death is out there fastened to the oak fence.’ So next day when the warlock was out, the prince came and gilded the whole fence; and in the evening when the warlock was at supper he looked out of the window and saw the fence glittering like gold. ‘And pray what may that be?’ said he to the princess. ‘You see,’ said she, ‘how I respect you. If you are dear to me, dear too is your death. That is why I have gilded the fence in which your death resides.’ The speech pleased the warlock, and in the fulness of his heart he revealed to her the fatal secret of the egg. When the prince, with the help of some friendly animals, obtained possession of the egg, he put it in his bosom and repaired to the warlock’s house. The warlock himself was sitting at the window in a very gloomy frame of mind; and when the prince appeared and shewed him the egg, the light grew dim in the warlock’s eyes and he became all of a sudden very meek and mild. But when the prince began to play with the egg and to throw it from one hand to the other, the deathless Koshchei staggered from one corner of the room to the other, and when the prince broke the egg, Koshchei the Deathless fell down and died. ‘In one of the descriptions of Koshchei’s death, he is said to be killed by a blow on the forehead inflicted by the mysterious egg—that last link in the magic chain by which his life is darkly bound. In another version of the same story, but told of a snake, the fatal blow is struck by a small stone found in the yolk of an egg, which is inside a duck, which is inside a hare, which is inside a stone, which is on an island.’ In another Russian story the death of an enchantress is in a blue rose-tree in a blue forest. Prince Ivan uproots the rose-tree, whereupon the enchantress straightway sickens. He brings the rose-tree to her house and

finds her at the point of death. Then he throws it into the cellar, crying, ‘Behold her death!’ and at once the whole building shakes, ‘and becomes an island, on which are people who had been sitting in Hell, and who offer up thanks to Prince Ivan.’ In another Russian story a prince is grievously tormented by a witch who has got hold of his heart, and keeps it seething in a magic cauldron.

Other versions of the story of Koshchei the Deathless.

Death in the blue rose tree.

In a Bohemian tale a warlock’s strength lies in an egg which is in a duck, which is in a stag, which is under a tree. A seer finds the egg and sucks it. Then the warlock grows as weak as a child, ‘for all his strength had passed into the seer.’ A Servian story relates how a certain warlock called True Steel carried off a prince’s wife and kept her shut up in his cave. But the prince contrived to get speech of her and told her that she must persuade True Steel to reveal to her where his strength lay. So when True Steel came home, the prince’s wife said to him, ‘Tell me, now, where is your great strength?’ He answered, ‘My wife, my strength is in my sword.’ Then she began to pray and turned to his sword. When True Steel saw that, he laughed and said, ‘O foolish woman! my strength is not in my sword, but in my bow and arrows.’ Then she turned towards the bow and arrows and prayed. But True Steel said, ‘I see, my wife, you have a clever teacher who has taught you to find out where my strength lies. I could almost say that your husband is living, and it is he who teaches you.’ But she assured him that nobody had taught her. When she found he had deceived her again, she waited for some days and then asked him again about the secret of his strength. He answered, ‘Since you think so much of my strength, I will tell you truly where it is. Far away from here there is a very high mountain; in the mountain there is a fox; in the fox there is a heart; in the heart there is a bird, and in this bird is my strength. It is no easy task, however, to catch the fox, for she can transform herself into a multitude of creatures.’ So next day, when True Steel went forth from the cave, the prince came and learned from his wife the true secret of the warlock’s strength. So away he hied to the mountain, and there, though the fox, or rather the vixen, turned herself into various shapes, he managed with the help of certain friendly eagles,

falcons, and dragons, to catch and kill her. Then he took out the fox’s heart, and out of the heart he took the bird and burned it in a great fire. At that very moment True Steel fell down dead.

The external soul in Bohemian and Servian stories.

True Steel, whose strength was in a bird.

In the Arabian Nights we read how Seyf el-Mulook, after wandering for four months over mountains and hills and deserts, came to a lofty palace in which he found the lovely daughter of the King of India sitting alone on a golden couch in a hall spread with silken carpets. She tells him that she is held captive by a jinnee, who had swooped down on her and carried her off while she was disporting herself with her female slaves in a tank in the great garden of her father the king. Seyf el-Mulook then offers to smite the jinnee with the sword and slay him. ‘But’, she replied, ‘thou canst not slay him unless thou kill his soul.’ ‘And in what place’, said he, ‘is his soul?’ She answered, ‘I asked him respecting it many times; but he would not confess to me its place. It happened, however, that I urged him, one day, and he was enraged against me, and said to me, “How often wilt thou ask me respecting my soul? What is the reason of thy question respecting my soul?” So I answered him, “O Ḥátim, there remaineth to me no one but thee, excepting God; and I, as long as I live, would not cease to hold thy soul in my embrace; and if I do not take care of thy soul, and put it in the midst of my eye, how can I live after thee? If I knew thy soul, I would take care of it as of my right eye.” And thereupon he said to me, “When I was born, the astrologers declared that the destruction of my soul would be effected by the hand of one of the sons of the human kings. I therefore took my soul, and put it into the crop of a sparrow, and I imprisoned the sparrow in a little box, and put this into another small box, and this I put within seven other small boxes, and I put these within seven chests, and the chests I put into a coffer of marble within the verge of this circumambient ocean; for this part is remote from the countries of mankind, and none of mankind can gain access to it.”’ But Seyf el-Mulook got possession of the sparrow and strangled it, and the jinnee fell upon the ground a heap of black ashes.

 The external soul in Arabian stories. The jinnee and the

sparrow.

In a Mongolian story the hero Joro gets the better of his enemy the lama Tschoridong in the following way. The lama, who is an enchanter, sends out his soul in the form of a wasp to sting Joro’s eyes. But Joro catches the wasp in his hand, and by alternately shutting and opening his hand he causes the lama alternately to lose and recover consciousness. In a Tartar poem two youths cut open the body of an old witch and tear out her bowels, but all to no purpose, she still lives. On being asked where her soul is, she answers that it is in the middle of her shoe-sole in the form of a seven- headed speckled snake. So one of the youths slices her shoe-sole with his sword, takes out the speckled snake, and cuts off its seven heads. Then the witch dies. Another Tartar poem describes how the hero Kartaga grappled with the Swan-woman. Long they wrestled. Moons waxed and waned and still they wrestled; years came and went, and still the struggle went on. But the piebald horse and the black horse knew that the Swan-woman’s soul was not in her. Under the black earth flow nine seas; where the seas meet and form one, the sea comes to the surface of the earth. At the mouth of the nine seas rises a rock of copper; it rises to the surface of the ground, it rises up between heaven and earth, this rock of copper. At the foot of the copper rock is a black chest, in the black chest is a golden casket, and in the golden casket is the soul of the Swan-woman. Seven little birds are the soul of the Swan-woman; if the birds are killed the Swan-woman will die straightway.

So the horses ran to the foot of the copper rock, opened the black chest, and brought back the golden casket. Then the piebald horse turned himself into a bald-headed man, opened the golden casket, and cut off the heads of the seven birds. So the Swan-woman died.

The external soul in a Mongolian story and Tartar poems.

A modern Chinese story tells how an habitual criminal used to take his soul out of his body for the purpose of evading righteous punishment of his crimes. This bad man lived in Khien (Kwei-cheu), and the sentences that had been passed on him formed a pile as high as a hill. The mandarins had flogged him to death with sticks and flung his mangled corpse into the river,

but three days afterwards the scoundrel got his soul back again, and on the fifth day he resumed his career of villainy as if nothing had happened. The thing occurred again and again, till at last it reached the ears of the Governor of the province, who flew into a violent passion and proposed to the Governor-General to have the rascal beheaded. And beheaded he was; but in three days the wretch was alive again with no trace of decapitation about him except a slender red thread round his neck. And now, like a giant refreshed, he began a fresh series of enormities. He even went so far as to beat his own mother. This was more than she could bear, and she brought the matter before the magistrate. She produced in court a vase and said, ‘In this vase my refractory son has hidden his soul. Whenever he was conscious of having committed a serious crime, or a misdeed of the most heinous kind, he remained at home, took his soul out of his body, purified it, and put it in the vase. Then the authorities only punished or executed his body of flesh and blood, and not his soul. With his soul, refined by a long process, he then cured his freshly mutilated body, which thus became able in three days to recommence in the old way. Now, however, his crimes have reached a climax, for he has beaten me, an old woman, and I cannot bear it. I pray you, smash this vase, and scatter his soul by fanning it away with a windwheel; and if then you castigate his body anew, it is probable that bad son of mine will really die.’ The mandarin took the hint. He had the rogue cudgelled to death, and when they examined the corpse they found that decay had set in within ten days.

The external soul in a Chinese story.

A Hausa story from Northern Nigeria runs thus. A certain man and his wife had four daughters born to them in succession, but every one of the baby girls mysteriously disappeared on the day when she was to be weaned; so the parents fell under the suspicion of having devoured them. Last of all there was born to them a son, who to avoid accidents was left to wean himself. One day, as he grew up, the son received a magic lotion from an old woman, who told him to rub his eyes with it. He did so, and immediately he saw a large house and entering it he found his eldest sister married to a bull. She bade him welcome and so did her husband the bull; and when he went away, the bull very kindly presented him with a lock of

his hair as a keepsake. In like manner the lad discovered his other three sisters, who were living in wedlock with a ram, a dog, and a hawk respectively. All of them welcomed him and from the ram, the dog, and the hawk he received tokens of regard in the shape of hair or feathers. Then he returned home and told his parents of his adventure and how he had found his sisters alive and married. Next day he went to a far city, where he made love to the Queen and persuaded her to plot with him against the life of the King her husband. So she coaxed the King to shew his affection for her by ‘taking his own life, and joining it to her’. The unsuspecting husband, as usual, fell into the trap set for him by his treacherous wife. He confided to her the secret of his life. ‘My life’, said he, ‘is behind the city, behind the city in a thicket. In this thicket there is a lake; in the lake is a rock; in the rock is a gazelle; in the gazelle is a dove; and in the dove is a small box.’ The Queen divulged the secret to her lover, who kindled a fire behind the city and threw into it the hair and feathers which he had received from the friendly animals, his brothers-in-law. Immediately the animals themselves appeared and readily gave their help in the enterprise. The bull drank up the lake; the ram broke up the rock; the dog caught the gazelle; the hawk captured the dove. So the youth extracted the precious box from the dove and repaired to the palace, where he found the King already dead. His Majesty had been ailing from the moment when the young man left the city, and he grew steadily worse with every fresh success of the adventurer who was to supplant him. So the hero became King and married the false Queen; and his sisters’ husbands were changed from animals into men and received subordinate posts in the government. The hero’s parents, too, came to live in the city over which he reigned.

The external soul in a Hausa story. The king whose life was in a

box.

The helpful animals.

The Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia tell of an ogress, who could not be killed because her life was in a hemlock branch. A brave boy met her in the woods, smashed her head with a stone, scattered her brains, broke her bones, and threw them into the water. Then, thinking he had disposed of the ogress, he went into her house. There he saw a woman rooted to the floor,

who warned him, saying, ‘Now do not stay long. I know that you have tried to kill the ogress. It is the fourth time that somebody has tried to kill her.

She never dies; she has nearly come to life. There in that covered hemlock branch is her life. Go there, and as soon as you see her enter, shoot her life.

Then she will be dead.’ Hardly had she finished speaking when sure enough in came the ogress, singing as she walked:

The ogress whose life was in a hemlock branch.

‘I have the magical treasure,

I have the supernatural power,

I can return to life.’

Such was her song. But the boy shot at her life, and she fell dead to the floor.

iii

Thus the idea that the soul may be deposited for a longer or shorter time in some place of security outside the body, or at all events in the hair, is found in the popular tales of many races. It remains to shew that the idea is not a mere figment devised to adorn a tale, but is a real article of primitive faith, which has given rise to a corresponding set of customs.

The external soul in folk-custom.

We have seen that in the tales the hero, as a preparation for battle, sometimes removes his soul from his body, in order that his body may be invulnerable and immortal in the combat. With a like intention the savage removes his soul from his body on various occasions of real or imaginary peril. Thus among the people of Minahassa in Celebes, when a family moves into a new house, a priest collects the souls of the whole family in a bag, and afterwards restores them to their owners, because the moment of entering a new house is supposed to be fraught with supernatural danger. In Southern Celebes, when a woman is brought to bed, the messenger who

fetches the doctor or the midwife always carries with him something made of iron, such as a chopping-knife, which he delivers to the doctor. The doctor must keep the thing in his house till the confinement is over, when he gives it back, receiving a fixed sum of money for doing so. The chopping-knife, or whatever it is, represents the woman’s soul, which at this critical time is believed to be safer out of her body than in it. Hence the doctor must take great care of the object; for were it lost, the woman’s soul would assuredly, they think, be lost with it.

The soul removed from the body as a precaution in seasons of

danger.

Souls of people collected in a bag at a house warming.

Soul of a woman put in a chopping-knife at childbirth.

The natives of Amboyna used to think that their strength was in their hair and would desert them if it were shorn. A criminal under torture in a Dutch Court of that island persisted in denying his guilt till his hair was cut off, when he immediately confessed. One man, who was tried for murder, endured without flinching the utmost ingenuity of his torturers till he saw the surgeon standing with a pair of shears. On asking what this was for, and being told that it was to cut his hair, he begged they would not do it, and made a clean breast. In subsequent cases, when torture failed to wring a confession from a prisoner, the Dutch authorities made a practice of cutting off his hair. In Ceram it is still believed that if young people have their hair cut they will be weakened and enervated thereby.

Strength of people supposed to reside in their hair.

Here in Europe it used to be thought that the maleficent powers of witches and wizards resided in their hair, and that nothing could make any impression on these miscreants so long as they kept their hair on. Hence in France it was customary to shave the whole bodies of persons charged with sorcery before handing them over to the torturer. Millaeus witnessed the torture of some persons at Toulouse, from whom no confession could be wrung until they were stripped and completely shaven, when they readily acknowledged the truth of the charge. A woman also, who apparently led a

pious life, was put to the torture on suspicion of witchcraft, and bore her agonies with incredible constancy, until complete depilation drove her to admit her guilt. The noted inquisitor Sprenger contented himself with shaving the head of the suspected witch or wizard; but his more thoroughgoing colleague Cumanus shaved the whole bodies of forty-one women before committing them all to the flames. He had high authority for this rigorous scrutiny, since Satan himself, in a sermon preached from the pulpit of North Berwick church, comforted his many servants by assuring them that no harm could befall them ‘sa lang as their hair wes on, and sould newir latt ane teir fall fra thair ene’. Similarly in Bastar, a province of India, ‘if a man is adjudged guilty of witchcraft, he is beaten by the crowd, his hair is shaved, the hair being supposed to constitute his power of mischief, his front teeth are knocked out, in order, it is said, to prevent him from muttering incantations…Women suspected of sorcery have to undergo the same ordeal; if found guilty, the same punishment is awarded, and after being shaved, their hair is attached to a tree in some public place.’ So among the Bhils of India, when a woman was convicted of witchcraft and had been subjected to various forms of persuasion, such as hanging head downwards from a tree and having pepper put into her eyes, a lock of hair was cut from her head and buried in the ground, ‘that the last link between her and her former powers of mischief might be broken’. In like manner among the Aztecs of Mexico, when wizards and witches ‘had done their evil deeds, and the time came to put an end to their detestable life, some one laid hold of them and cropped the hair on the crown of their heads, which took from them all their power of sorcery and enchantment, and then it was that by death they put an end to their odious existence’.

Witches and wizards shaved to deprive them of their power.

Further it has been shewn that in folk-tales the life of a person is sometimes so bound up with the life of a plant that withering of the plant will immediately follow or be followed by the death of the person.

Similarly among the natives of the Pennefather River in Queensland, when a visitor has made himself very agreeable and taken his departure, an effigy of him about three or four feet long is cut on some soft tree, such as the Canarium australasicum, so as to face in the direction taken by the popular

stranger. Afterwards from observing the state of the tree the natives infer the corresponding state of their absent friend, whose illness or death are apparently supposed to be portended by the fall of the leaves or of the tree.

In Uganda, when a new royal enclosure with its numerous houses was built for a new king, barkcloth trees used to be planted at the main entrance by priests of each principal deity and offerings were laid under each tree for its particular god. Thenceforth ‘the trees were carefully guarded and tended, because it was believed that as they grew and flourished, so the king’s life and power would increase’. Among the M’Bengas in Western Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same day, the people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round them. The life of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one of the trees; and if the tree dies or is thrown down, they are sure that the child will soon die. In Sierra Leone also it is customary at the birth of a child to plant a shoot of a malep-tree, and they think that the tree will grow with the child and be its god. If a tree which has been thus planted withers away, the people consult a sorcerer on the subject. Among the Wajagga of German East Africa, when a child is born, it is usual to plant a cultivated plant of some sort behind the house. The plant is thenceforth carefully tended, for they believe that were it to wither away the child would die. When the navel-string drops from the infant, it is buried under the plant. The species of birth-plant varies with the clan; members of one clan, for example, plant a particular sort of banana, members of another clan plant a sugar-cane, and so on. Among the Swahili of East Africa, when a child is born, the afterbirth and navel-string are buried in the courtyard and a mark is made on the spot. Seven days afterwards, the hair of the child is shaved and deposited, along with the clippings of its nails, in the same place. Then over all these relics of the infant’s person a coco-nut is planted. As the tree grows up from the nut, the child likes to point it out to his playfellows and tell them, ‘This coco-nut palm is my navel.’ In planting the coco-nut the parents say, ‘May God cause our child to grow up, that he or she may one day enjoy the coco-nut milk of the tree which we plant here.’ Though it is not expressly affirmed, we may perhaps assume that such a birth-tree is supposed to stand in a sympathetic relation with the life of the person. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of a tree. The chief of Old Town in Calabar kept his soul in a sacred grove near a spring of water. When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of the

grove, the spirit was most indignant and threatened the perpetrators of the deed, according to the king, with all manner of evil. Among the Fans of the French Congo, when a chiefs son is born, the remains of the navel-string are buried under a sacred fig-tree, and ‘thenceforth great importance is attached to the growth of the tree; it is strictly forbidden to touch it. Any attempt on the tree would be considered as an attack on the human being himself.’ Among the Boloki of the Upper Congo a family has a plant with red leaves (called nkungu) for its totem. When a woman of the family is with child for the first time, one of the totemic plants is planted near the hearth outside the house and is never destroyed, otherwise it is believed that the child would be born thin and weak and would remain puny and sickly. ‘The healthy life of the children and family is bound up with the healthiness and life of the totem tree as respected and preserved by the family.’ Among the Baganda of Central Africa a child’s afterbirth was called the second child and was believed to be animated by a spirit, which at once became a ghost. The afterbirth was usually buried at the root of a banana tree, and afterwards the tree was carefully guarded by old women, who prevented any one from going near it; they tied ropes of fibre from tree to tree to isolate it, and all the child’s excretions were thrown into this enclosure. When the fruit ripened, it was cut by the old woman in charge. The reason for guarding the tree thus carefully was a belief that if any stranger were to eat of the fruit of the tree or to drink beer brewed from it, he would carry off with him the ghost of the child’s afterbirth, which had been buried at the root of the banana-tree, and the living child would then die in order to follow its twin ghost. Whereas a grandparent of the child, by eating the fruit or drinking the beer, averted this catastrophe and ensured the health of the child. Among the Wakondyo, at the north-western corner of Lake Albert Nyanza, it is customary to bury the afterbirth at the foot of a young banana-tree, and the fruit of this particular tree may be eaten by no one but the woman who assisted at the birth. The reason for the custom is not mentioned, but probably, as among the Baganda, the life of the child is supposed to be bound up with the life of the tree, since the afterbirth, regarded as a spiritual double of the infant, has been buried at the root of the tree.

Life of a person supposed to be bound up with that of a tree or

plant.

Birth-trees in Africa.

 In the midst of the ‘Forbidden City’ at Peking there is a tiny private garden, where the emperors of the now fallen Manchu dynasty used to take the air and refresh themselves after the cares of state. In accordance with Chinese taste the garden is a labyrinth of artificial rockeries, waterfalls, grottoes, and kiosks, in which everything is as unlike nature as art can make it. The trees in particular (Arbor vitae), the principal ornament of the garden, exhibit the last refinement of the gardener’s skill, being clipped and distorted into a variety of grotesque shapes. Only one of the trees remained intact and had been spared these deformations for centuries. Far from being stunted by the axe or the shears, the tree was carefully tended and encouraged to shoot up to its full height. ‘It was the “Life-tree of the Dynasty”, and according to legend the prosperity or fall of the present dynasty went hand in hand with the welfare or death of the tree. Certainly, if we accept the tradition, the days of the present reigning house must be numbered, for all the care and attention lavished on the tree have been for some years in vain. A glance at our illustration shews the tree as it still surpasses all its fellows in height and size; but it owes its pre-eminence only to the many artificial props which hold it up. In reality the “Life-tree of the Dynasty” is dying, and might fall over night, if one of its artificial props were suddenly to give way. For the superstitious Chinese—and superstitious they certainly are—it is a very, very evil omen.’ Some twelve years have passed since this passage was written, and in the interval the omen has been fulfilled—the Manchu dynasty has fallen. We may conjecture that the old tree in the quaint old garden has fallen too. So vain are all human efforts to arrest the decay of royal houses by underpropping trees on which nature herself has passed a sentence of death.

The Life-tree of the Manchu dynasty.

At Rome in the ancient sanctuary of Quirinus there grew two old myrtle-trees, one named the Patrician and the other the Plebeian. For many years, so long as the patricians were in the ascendant, their myrtle-tree flourished and spread its branches abroad, while the myrtle of the plebeians was shrivelled and shrunken; but from the time of the Marsian war, when the power of the nobles declined, their myrtle in like manner drooped and withered, whereas that of the popular party held up its head and grew

strong. Thrice when Vespasia was with child, an old oak in the garden of the Flavian family near Rome suddenly put forth branches. The first branch was puny and soon withered away, and the girl who was born accordingly died within the year; the second branch was long and sturdy; and the third was like a tree. So on the third occasion the happy father reported to his mother that a future emperor was born to her as a grandchild. The old lady only laughed to think that at her age she should keep her wits about her, while her son had lost his; yet the omen of the oak came true, for the grandson was afterwards the emperor Vespasian.

The myrtle-trees of the patricians and plebeians at Rome.

The oak of the Vespasian family.

But in practice, as in folk-tales, it is not merely with inanimate objects and plants that a person is occasionally believed to be united by a bond of physical sympathy. The same bond, it is supposed, may exist between a man and an animal, so that the welfare of the one depends on the welfare of the other, and when the animal dies the man dies also. The analogy between the custom and the tales is all the closer because in both of them the power of thus removing the soul from the body and stowing it away in an animal is often a special privilege of wizards and witches. Thus the Yakuts of Siberia believe that every shaman or wizard keeps his soul, or one of his souls, incarnate in an animal which is carefully concealed from all the world.

‘Nobody can find my external soul,’ said one famous wizard, ‘it lies hidden far away in the stony mountains of Edzhigansk.’ Only once a year, when the last snows melt and the earth turns black, do these external souls of wizards appear in the shape of animals among the dwellings of men. They wander everywhere, yet none but wizards can see them. The strong ones sweep roaring and noisily along, the weak steal about quietly and furtively. Often they fight, and then the wizard whose external soul is beaten, falls ill or dies. The weakest and most cowardly wizards are they whose souls are incarnate in the shape of dogs, for the dog gives his human double no peace, but gnaws his heart and tears his body. The most powerful wizards are they whose external souls have the shape of stallions, elks, black bears, eagles, or boars. Again, the Samoyeds of the Turukhinsk region hold that every shaman has a familiar spirit in the shape of a boar, which he leads

about by a magic belt. On the death of the boar the shaman himself dies; and stories are told of battles between wizards, who send their spirits to fight before they encounter each other in person. In Yorkshire witches are thought to stand in such peculiarly close relations to hares, that if a particular hare is killed or wounded, a certain witch will at the same moment be killed or receive a hurt in her body exactly corresponding to the wound in the hare. However, this fancy is probably a case of the general European belief that witches have the power of temporarily transforming themselves into certain animals, particularly hares and cats, and that any hurts inflicted on such transformed animals are felt by the witches who are concealed in the animals. But the notion that a person can temporarily transform himself into an animal differs from the notion that he can deposit his soul for a longer or shorter period in an animal, while he himself retains the human form; though in the cloudy mind of the peasant and the savage the two ideas may not always be sharply distinguished. The Malays believe that ‘the soul of a person may pass into another person or into an animal, or rather that such a mysterious relation can arise between the two that the fate of the one is wholly dependent on that of the other’.

Belief in a sympathetic relation between a man and an animal

such that the fate of the one depends on that of the other.

The external souls of Yakut shamans in animals.

Sympathetic relation between witches and hares.

Among the Melanesians of Mota, one of the New Hebrides islands, the conception of an external soul is carried out in the practice of daily life. The Mota word for soul is atai. ‘The use of the word atai in Mota seems properly and originally to have been to signify something peculiarly and intimately connected with a person and sacred to him, something that he has set his fancy upon when he has seen it in what has seemed to him a wonderful manner, or some one has shewn it to him as such. Whatever the thing might be the man believed it to be the reflection of his own personality; he and his atai flourished, suffered, lived, and died together.

But the word must not be supposed to have been borrowed from this use and applied secondarily to describe the soul; the word carries a sense with it which is applicable alike to that second self, the visible object so

mysteriously connected with the man, and to this invisible second self which we call the soul. There is another Mota word, tamaniu, which has almost if not quite the same meaning as atai has when it describes something animate or inanimate which a man has come to believe to have an existence intimately connected with his own. The word tamaniu may be taken to be properly “likeness”, and the noun form of the adverb tama, as, like. It was not every one in Mota who had his tamaniu; only some men fancied that they had this relation to a lizard, a snake, or it might be a stone; sometimes the thing was sought for and found by drinking the infusion of certain leaves and heaping together the dregs; then whatever living thing was first seen in or upon the heap was the tamaniu. It was watched but not fed or worshipped; the natives believed that it came at call, and that the life of the man was bound up with the life of his tamaniu, if a living thing, or with its safety; should it die, or if not living get broken or be lost, the man would die. Hence in case of sickness they would send to see if the tamaniu was safe and well. This word has never been used apparently for the soul in Mota; but in Aurora in the New Hebrides it is the accepted equivalent. It is well worth observing that both the atai and the tamaniu, and it may be added the Motlav talegi, is something which has a substantial existence of its own, as when a snake or stone is a man’s atai or tamaniu; a soul then when called by these names is conceived of as something in a way substantial.’

Melanesian conception of the tamaniu, a person’s external soul

lodged in an animal or other object.

From this account, which we owe to the careful and accurate researches of the Revd Dr Codrington, we gather that while every person in Mota has a second self or external soul in a visible object called an atai, only some people have, it may be, a second external soul in another visible object called a tamaniu. We may conjecture that persons who have a tamaniu in addition to an atai are more than usually anxious as to the state of their soul, and that they seek to put it in perfect security by what we may call a system of double insurance, calculating that if one of their external souls should die or be broken, they themselves may still survive by virtue of the survival of the other. Be that as it may, the tamaniu discharges two

functions, one of them defensive and the other offensive. On the one hand, so long as it lives or remains unbroken, it preserves its owner in life; and on the other hand it helps him to injure his enemies. In its offensive character, if the tamaniu happens to be an eel, it will bite its owner’s enemy; if it is a shark, it will swallow him. In its defensive character, the state of the tamaniu is a symptom or life-token of the state of the man; hence when he is ill he will visit and examine it, or if he cannot go himself he will send another to inspect it and report. In either case the man turns the animal, if animal it be, carefully over in order to see what is the matter with it; should something be found sticking to its skin, it is removed, and through the relief thus afforded to the creature the sick man recovers. But if the animal should be found dying, it is an omen of death for the man; for whenever it dies he dies also.

Sympathetic relation between a man and his tamaniu (external

soul).

The theory of an external soul deposited in an animal appears to be very prevalent in West Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gaboon. In the latter part of the nineteenth century two English missionaries, established at San Salvador, the capital of the King of Congo, asked the natives repeatedly whether any of them had seen the strange, big, East African goat which Stanley had given to a chief at Stanley Pool in 1877. But their enquiries were fruitless; no native would admit that he had seen the goat. Some years afterwards the missionaries discovered why they could obtain no reply to their enquiry. All the people, it turned out, imagined that the missionaries believed the spirit of the King of Salvador to be contained in the goat, and that they wished to obtain possession of the animal in order to exercise an evil influence on his majesty. The belief from the standpoint of the Congo savages was natural enough, since in that region some chiefs regularly link their fate to that of an animal. Thus the Chief Bankwa of Ndolo, on the Moeko River, had conferred this honour on a certain hippopotamus of the neighbourhood, at which he would allow nobody to shoot. At the village of Ongek, in the Gaboon, a French missionary* slept in the hut of an old Fan chief. Awakened about two in the morning by a rustling of dry leaves, he lit a torch, when to his horror he

perceived a huge black serpent of the most dangerous sort, coiled in a corner, with head erect, shining eyes, and hissing jaws, ready to dart at him.

Instinctively he seized his gun and pointed it at the reptile, when suddenly his arm was struck up, the torch was extinguished, and the voice of the old chief said, ‘Don’t fire! don’t fire! I beg of you. In killing the serpent, it is me that you would kill. Fear nothing. The serpent is my elangela.’ So saying he flung himself on his knees beside the reptile, put his arms about it, and clasped it to his breast. The serpent received his caresses quietly, manifesting neither anger nor fear, and the chief carried it off and laid it down beside him in another hut, exhorting the missionary to have no fear and never to speak of the subject. His curiosity being excited by this adventure, the missionary, Father Trilles, pursued his enquiries and ascertained that among the Fans of the Gaboon every wizard is believed at initiation to unite his life with that of some particular wild animal by a rite of blood-brotherhood; he draws blood from the ear of the animal and from his own arm, and inoculates the animal with his own blood, and himself with the blood of the beast. Henceforth such an intimate union is established between the two that the death of the one entails the death of the other. The alliance is thought to bring to the wizard or sorcerer a great accession of power, which he can turn to his advantage in various ways. In the first place, like the warlock in the fairy tales who has deposited his life outside of himself in some safe place, the Fan wizard now deems himself invulnerable. Moreover, the animal with which he has exchanged blood has become his familiar, and will obey any orders he may choose to give it; so he makes use of it to injure and kill his enemies. For that reason the creature with whom he establishes the relation of blood-brotherhood is never a tame or domestic animal, but always a ferocious and dangerous wild beast, such as a leopard, a black serpent, a crocodile, a hippopotamus, a wild boar, or a vulture. Of all these creatures the leopard is by far the commonest familiar of Fan wizards, and next to it comes the black serpent; the vulture is the rarest. Witches as well as wizards have their familiars; but the animals with which the lives of women are thus bound up generally differ from those to which men commit their external souls. A witch never has a panther for her familiar, but often a venomous species of serpent, sometimes a horned viper, sometimes a black serpent, sometimes a green one that lives in banana-trees; or it may be a vulture, an owl, or other bird of night. In every case the beast or bird with which the witch or wizard has contracted this

mystic alliance is an individual, never a species; and when the individual animal dies the alliance is naturally at an end, since the death of the animal is supposed to entail the death of the man.

The theory of an external soul lodged in an animal is very

prevalent in West Africa.

The soul of a chief in a hippopotamus or a black snake.

Belief of the Fans that every wizard unites his life to that of a

wild animal by a rite of blood brotherhood.

A similar belief in the external souls of living people is entertained by the Ibos. They think that a man’s spirit can quit his body for a time during life and take up its abode in an animal. This is called ishi anu, ‘to turn animal’. A man who wishes to acquire this power procures a certain drug from a wise man and mixes it with his food. After that his soul goes out and enters into the animal. If it should happen that the animal is killed while the man’s soul is lodged in it, the man dies; and if the animal be wounded, the man’s body will presently be covered with boils. This belief instigates to many deeds of darkness; for a sly rogue will sometimes surreptitiously administer the magical drug to his enemy in his food, and having thus smuggled the other’s soul into an animal will destroy the creature, and with it the man whose soul is lodged in it. A like belief is reported to prevail among the tribes of the Obubura Hill district on the Cross River in Southern Nigeria. Once when Mr Partridge’s canoe-men wished to catch fish near a town of the Assiga tribe, the people objected, saying, ‘Our souls live in those fish, and if you kill them we shall die.’

Belief of the Ibos in external human souls which are lodged in

animals.

The negroes of Calabar, at the mouth of the Niger, believe that every person has four souls, one of which always lives outside of his or her body in the form of a wild beast in the forest. This external soul, or bush soul, as Miss Kingsley calls it, may be almost any animal, for example, a leopard, a

fish, or a tortoise; but it is never a domestic animal and never a plant.

Unless he is gifted with second sight, a man cannot see his own bush soul, but a diviner will often tell him what sort of creature his bush soul is, and after that the man will be careful not to kill any animal of that species, and will strongly object to any one else doing so. A man and his sons have usually the same sort of animals for their bush souls, and so with a mother and her daughters. But sometimes all the children of a family take after the bush soul of their father; for example, if his external soul is a leopard, all his sons and daughters will have leopards for their external souls. And on the other hand, sometimes they all take after their mother; for instance, if her external soul is a tortoise, all the external souls of her sons and daughters will be tortoises too. So intimately bound up is the life of the man with that of the animal which he regards as his external or bush soul, that the death or injury of the animal necessarily entails the death or injury of the man. And, conversely, when the man dies, his bush soul can no longer find a place of rest, but goes mad and rushes into the fire or charges people and is knocked on the head, and that is an end of it. When a person is sick, the diviner will sometimes tell him that his bush soul is angry at being neglected; thereupon the patient will make an offering to the offended spirit and deposit it in a tiny hut in the forest at the spot where the animal, which is his external soul, was last seen. If the bush soul is appeased, the patient recovers; but if it is not, he dies. Yet the foolish bush soul does not understand that in injuring the man it injures itself, and that it cannot long survive his decease.

Belief of the negroes of Calabar that every person has an

external or bush soul lodged in a wild beast.

Amongst the Zapotecs of Central America, when a woman was about to be confined, her relations assembled in the hut, and began to draw on the floor figures of different animals, rubbing each one out as soon as it was completed. This went on till the moment of birth, and the figure that then remained sketched upon the ground was called the child’s tona or second self. ‘When the child grew old enough, he procured the animal that represented him and took care of it, as it was believed that health and existence were bound up with that of the animal’s, in fact that the death of

both would occur simultaneously’, or rather that when the animal died the man would die too. Among the Indians of Guatemala and Honduras the nagual or naual is ‘that animate or inanimate object, generally an animal, which stands in a parallel relation to a particular man, so that the weal and woe of the man depend on the fate of the nagual’. According to an old writer, many Indians of Guatemala ‘are deluded by the devil to believe that their life dependeth upon the life of such and such a beast (which they take unto them as their familiar spirit), and think that when that beast dieth they must die; when he is chased, their hearts pant; when he is faint, they are faint; nay, it happeneth that by the devil’s delusion they appear in the shape of that beast (which commonly by their choice is a buck, or doe, a lion, or tigre, or dog, or eagle) and in that shape have been shot at and wounded.’ Herrera’s account of the way in which the Indians of Honduras acquired their naguals, runs thus: ‘The devil deluded them, appearing in the shape of a lion or a tiger, or a coyte, a beast like a wolf, or in the shape of an alligator, a snake, or a bird, that province abounding in creatures of prey, which they called naguales, signifying keepers or guardians, and when the bird died the Indian that was in league with him died also, which often happened and was looked upon as infallible. The manner of contracting this alliance was thus. The Indian repaired to the river, wood, hill, or most obscure place, where he called upon the devils by such names as he thought fit, talked to the rivers, rocks, or woods, said he went to weep that he might have the same his predecessors had, carrying a cock or a dog to sacrifice. In that melancholy fit he fell asleep, and either in a dream or waking saw some one of the aforesaid birds or other creatures, whom he entreated to grant him profit in salt, cacao, or any other commodity, drawing blood from his own tongue, ears, and other parts of his body, making his contract at the same time with the said creature, the which either in a dream or waking told him, “Such a day you shall go abroad asporting, and I will be the first bird or other animal you shall meet, and will be your nagual and companion at all times.” Whereupon such friendship was contracted between them, that when one of them died the other did not survive, and they fancied that he who had no nagual could not be rich.’ The Indians were persuaded that the death of their nagual would entail their own. Legend affirms that in the first battles with the Spaniards on the plateau of Quetzaltenango the naguals of the Indian chiefs fought in the form of serpents. The nagual of the highest chief was especially conspicuous, because it had the form of a great bird,

resplendent in green plumage. The Spanish general Pedro de Alvarado killed the bird with his lance, and at the same moment the Indian chief fell dead to the ground.

The conception of an external soul lodged in an animal occurs

among the Indians of Central America, some of whom call such

a soul a nagual.

In many tribes of South-Eastern Australia each sex used to regard a particular species of animals in the same way that a Central American Indian regarded his nagual, but with this difference, that whereas the Indian apparently knew the individual animal with which his life was bound up, the Australians only knew that each of their lives was bound up with some one animal of the species, but they could not say with which. The result naturally was that every man spared and protected all the animals of the species with which the lives of the men were bound up; and every woman spared and protected all the animals of the species with which the lives of the women were bound up; because no one knew but that the death of any animal of the respective species might entail his or her own; just as the killing of the green bird was immediately followed by the death of the Indian chief, and the killing of the parrot by the death of Punchkin in the fairy tale. Thus, for example, the Wotjobaluk tribe of South-Eastern Australia ‘held that “the life of Ngŭnŭngŭnŭt (the Bat) is the life of a man, and the life of Yartatgŭrk (the Nightjar) is the life of a woman”, and that when either of these creatures is killed the life of some man or of some woman is shortened. In such a case every man or every woman in the camp feared that he or she might be the victim, and from this cause great fights arose in this tribe. I learn that in these fights, men on one side and women on the other, it was not at all certain which would be victorious, for at times the women gave the men a severe drubbing with their yamsticks, while often women were injured or killed by spears.’ The Wotjobaluk said that the bat was the man’s ‘brother’ and that the nightjar was his ‘wife’. The particular species of animals with which the lives of the sexes were believed to be respectively bound up varied somewhat from tribe to tribe.

Thus whereas among the Wotjobaluk the bat was the animal of the men, at Gunbower Creek on the Lower Murray the bat seems to have been the

animal of the women, for the natives would not kill it for the reason that ‘if it was killed, one of their lubras [women] would be sure to die in consequence’. In the Kurnai tribe of Gippsland the emu-wren (Stipiturus malachurus) was the ‘man’s brother’ and the superb warbler (Malurus cyaneus) was the ‘woman’s sister’; at the initiation of young men into the tribal mysteries the name of the emu-wren was invoked over the novices for the purpose of infusing manly virtue into them. Among the Yuin on the south-eastern coast of Australia, the ‘woman’s sister’ was the tree-creeper (Climacteris scandens), and the men had both the bat and the emu-wren for their ‘brothers’. In the Kulin nation each sex had a pair of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’; the men had the bat and the emu-wren for their ‘brothers’, and the women had the superb warbler and the small nightjar for their ‘sisters’. It is notable that in South-Eastern Australia the animals thus associated with the lives of men and women were generally flying creatures, either birds or bats. However, in the Port Lincoln tribe of South Australia the man’s ‘brother’ and the woman’s ‘sister’ seem to have been identified with the male and female respectively of a species of lizard; for we read that ‘a small kind of lizard, the male of which is called ibirri, and the female waka, is said to have divided the sexes in the human species; an event that would appear not to be much approved of by the natives, since either sex has a mortal hatred against the opposite sex of these little animals, the men always destroying the waka and the women the ibirri.’ But whatever the particular sorts of creature with which the lives of men and women were believed to be bound up, the belief itself and the fights to which it gave rise are known to have prevailed over a large part of South-Eastern Australia, and probably they extended much farther. The belief was a very serious one, and so consequently were the fights which sprang from it. Thus among some tribes of Victoria ‘the common bat belongs to the men, who protect it against injury, even to the half-killing of their wives for its sake. The fern owl, or large goatsucker, belongs to the women, and, although a bird of evil omen, creating terror at night by its cry, it is jealously protected by them. If a man kills one, they are as much enraged as if it was one of their children, and will strike him with their long poles.’

In some tribes of South-Eastern Australia the lives of the two

sexes are thought to be bound up with the lives of the two

different kinds of animals, as bats and owls.

 The jealous protection thus afforded by Australian men and women to bats and owls respectively (for bats and owls seem to be the creatures usually allotted to the two sexes) is not based upon purely selfish considerations. For each man believes that not only his own life but the lives of his father, brothers, sons, and so on are bound up with the lives of particular bats, and that therefore in protecting the bat species he is protecting the lives of all his male relations as well as his own. Similarly, each woman believes that the lives of her mother, sisters, daughters, and so forth, equally with her own, are bound up with the lives of particular owls, and that in guarding the owl species she is guarding the lives of all her female relations besides her own. Now, when men’s lives are thus supposed to be contained in certain animals, it is obvious that the animals can hardly be distinguished from the men, or the men from the animals. If my brother John’s life is in a bat, then, on the one hand, the bat is my brother as well as John; and, on the other hand, John is in a sense a bat, since his life is in a bat. Similarly, if my sister Mary’s life is in an owl, then the owl is my sister and Mary is an owl. This is a natural enough conclusion, and the Australians have not failed to draw it. When the bat is the man’s animal, it is called his brother; and when the owl is the woman’s animal, it is called her sister. And conversely a man addresses a woman as an owl, and she addresses him as a bat. So with the other animals allotted to the sexes respectively in other tribes. For example, among the Kurnai all emu-wrens were ‘brothers’ of the men, and all the men were emu-wrens; all superb warblers were ‘sisters’ of the women, and all the women were superb warblers.

Bats regarded as the brothers of men, and owls as the sisters of

women.