Section 1. The Omnipresence of Demons.
IN THE FOREGOING chapter the primitive principle of the transference of
ills to another person, animal, or thing was explained and illustrated. But
similar means have been adopted to free a whole community from diverse
evils that afflict it. Such attempts to dismiss at once the accumulated
sorrows of a people are by no means rare or exceptional; on the contrary
they have been made in many lands, and from being occasional they tend
to become periodic and annual. 1
It needs some effort on our part to realise the frame of mind which prompts
these attempts. Bred in a philosophy which strips nature of personality and
reduces it to the unknown cause of an orderly series of impressions on our
senses, we find it hard to put ourselves in the place of the savage, to
whom the same impressions appear in the guise of spirits or the handiwork
of spirits. For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding
farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from
hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and
lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches forth the lightning,
and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with flakes
of burning red the golden eve. The spirits are gone even from their last
stronghold in the sky, whose blue arch no longer passes, except with
children, for the screen that hides from mortal eyes the glories of the
celestial world. Only in poets' dreams or impassioned flights of oratory is it
given to catch a glimpse of the last flutter of the standards of the retreating
host, to hear the beat of their invisible wings, the sound of their mocking
laughter, or the swell of angel music dying away in the distance. Far
otherwise is it with the savage. To his imagination the world still teems with
those motley beings whom a more sober philosophy has discarded. Fairies
and goblins, ghosts and demons, still hover about him both waking and
sleeping. They dog his footsteps, dazzle his senses, enter into him, harass
and deceive and torment him in a thousand freakish and mischievous
ways. The mishaps that befall him, the losses he sustains, the pains he has
to endure, he commonly sets down, if not to the magic of his enemies, to
the spite or anger or caprice of the spirits. Their constant presence wearies
him, their sleepless malignity exasperates him; he longs with an
unspeakable longing to be rid of them altogether, and from time to time,
driven to bay, his patience utterly exhausted, he turns fiercely on his
persecutors and makes a desperate effort to chase the whole pack of them
from the land, to clear the air of their swarming multitudes, that he may
breathe more freely and go on his way unmolested, at least for a time.
Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a
clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand
hunting out and expulsion of devils or ghosts. They think that if they can
only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start
in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden
age will come true again. 2
