Section 1. The Transference to Inanimate Objects.
WE have now traced the practice of killing a god among peoples in the
hunting, pastoral, and agricultural stages of society; and I have attempted
to explain the motives which led men to adopt so curious a custom. One
aspect of the custom still remains to be noticed. The accumulated
misfortunes and sins of the whole people are sometimes laid upon the dying
god, who is supposed to bear them away for ever, leaving the people
innocent and happy. The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings
to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind.
It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the
mental, between the material and the immaterial. Because it is possible to
shift a load of wood, stones, or what not, from our own back to the back of
another, the savage fancies that it is equally possible to shift the burden of
his pains and sorrows to another, who will suffer them in his stead. Upon
this idea he acts, and the result is an endless number of very unamiable
devices for palming off upon some one else the trouble which a man
shrinks from bearing himself. In short, the principle of vicarious suffering is
commonly understood and practised by races who stand on a low level of
social and intellectual culture. In the following pages I shall illustrate the
theory and the practice as they are found among savages in all their naked
simplicity, undisguised by the refinements of metaphysics and the subtleties
of theology. 1
The devices to which the cunning and selfish savage resorts for the sake
of easing himself at the expense of his neighbour are manifold; only a few
typical examples out of a multitude can be cited. At the outset it is to be
observed that the evil of which a man seeks to rid himself need not be
transferred to a person; it may equally well be transferred to an animal or a
thing, though in the last case the thing is often only a vehicle to convey the
trouble to the first person who touches it. In some of the East Indian islands
they think that epilepsy can be cured by striking the patient on the face
with the leaves of certain trees and then throwing them away. The disease
is believed to have passed into the leaves, and to have been thrown away
with them. To cure toothache some of the Australian blacks apply a heated
spear-thrower to the cheek. The spear-thrower is then cast away, and the
toothache goes with it in the shape of a black stone called karriitch. Stones
of this kind are found in old mounds and sandhills. They are carefully
collected and thrown in the direction of enemies in order to give them
toothache. The Bahima, a pastoral people of Uganda, often suffer from
deep-seated abscesses: "their cure for this is to transfer the disease to
some other person by obtaining herbs from the medicine-man, rubbing
them over the place where the swelling is, and burying them in the road
where people continually pass; the first person who steps over these buried
herbs contracts the disease, and the original patient recovers." 2
Sometimes in case of sickness the malady is transferred to an effigy as a
preliminary to passing it on to a human being. Thus among the Baganda the
medicine-man would sometimes make a model of his patient in clay; then a
relative of the sick man would rub the image over the sufferer's body and
either bury it in the road \??\ it in the grass by the wayside. The first person
who stepped over the image or passed by it would catch the disease.
Sometimes the effigy was made out of a plantain-flower tied up so as to
look like a person; it was used in the same way as the clay figure. But the
use of images for this maleficent purpose was a capital crime; any person
caught in the act of burying one of them in the public road would surely
have been put to death. 3
In the western district of the island of Timor, when men or women are
making long and tiring journeys, they fan themselves with leafy branches,
which they afterwards throw away on particular spots where their
forefathers did the same before them. The fatigue which they felt is thus
supposed to have passed into the leaves and to be left behind. Others use
stones instead of leaves. Similarly in the Babar Archipelago tired people
will strike themselves with stones, believing that they thus transfer to the
stones the weariness which they felt in their own bodies. They then throw
away the stones in places which are specially set apart for the purpose. A
like belief and practice in many distant parts of the world have given rise to
those cairns or heaps of sticks and leaves which travellers often observe
beside the path, and to which every passing native adds his contribution in
the shape of a stone, or stick, or leaf. Thus in the Solomon and Banks'
Islands the natives are wont to throw sticks, stones, or leaves upon a heap
at a place of steep descent, or where a difficult path begins, saying, "There
goes my fatigue." The act is not a religious rite, for the thing thrown on the
heap is not an offering to spiritual powers, and the words which accompany
the act are not a prayer. It is nothing but a magical ceremony for getting rid
of fatigue, which the simple savage fancies he can embody in a stick, leaf,
or stone, and so cast it from him. 4