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god and appease him with the promised sacrifice of a hog; these exorcists are a class of priests, and the people have no other doctors.1 Where the world-wide doctrine of disease-demons has held sway, men's minds, full of spells and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs and regimen.

The cases in which disease-possession passes into oraclepossession are especially connected with hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections. Mr. Backhouse describes a Tasmanian native sorcerer, "affected with fits of spasmodic contraction of the muscles of one breast, which he attributes, as they do all other diseases, to the devil"; this malady served to prove his inspiration to his people. When Dr. Mason was preaching near a village of heathen Pwo, a man fell down in an epileptic fit, his familiar spirit having come over him to forbid the people to listen to the missionary, and he sang out his denunciations like one frantic. This man was afterwards converted, and told the missionary that "he could not account for his former exercises, but that it certainly appeared to him as though a spirit spoke, and he must tell what was communicated." In this Karen district flourishes the native "wee" or prophet, whose business is to work himself into the state in which he can see departed spirits, visit their distant home, and even recall them to the body, thus raising the dead; these wees are nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums, and in giving oracles they go into actual convulsions. Dr. Callaway's details of the state of the Zulu diviners are singularly instructive. Their symptoms are ascribed to possession by "amatongo" or ancestral spirits; the disease is common, from some it departs of its own accord, others have the ghost laid which causes it, and others let the affection take its course and become professional diviners, whose powers of finding hidden things and giving apparently inaccessible

1 Hodgson, 'Abor. of India,' pp. 163, 170.

2 Backhouse, 'Australia,' p. 103.

3 Mason in Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 414. Cross, 1. c. p. 305.

information are vouched for by native witnesses, who at the same time are not blind to their tricks and their failures. The most perfect description is that of a hysterical visionary, who had "the disease which precedes the power to divine." This man describes that well-known symptom of hysteria, the heavy weight creeping up within him to his shoulders, his vivid dreams, his waking visions of objects that are not there when he approaches, the songs that come to him without learning, the sensation of flying in the air. This man was "of a family who are very sensitive, and become doctors." Persons whose constitutional unsoundness induces morbid manifestations are indeed marked out by nature to become seers and sorcerers. Among the Patagonians, patients seized with falling sickness or St. Vitus's dance were at once selected for magicians, as chosen by the demons themselves who possessed, distorted, and convulsed them. Among Siberian tribes, the shamans select children liable to convulsions as suitable to be brought up to the profession, which is apt to become hereditary with the epileptic tendencies it belongs to.3 Thus, even in the lower culture, a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts begin to have that power over the minds of their lustier fellows, which they have kept in so remarkable a way through the course of history.

Morbid oracular manifestations are habitually excited on purpose, and moreover the professional sorcerer commonly exaggerates or wholly feigns them. In the more genuine manifestations the medium may be so intensely wrought upon by the idea that a possessing spirit is speaking from within him, that he may not only give this spirit's name and speak in its character, but possibly may in good faith alter his voice to suit the spiritual utterance. This gift of spiritutterance, which belongs to "ventriloquism" in the ancient and proper sense of the term, of course lapses into sheer

1 Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' pp. 183, etc., 259, etc.

2 Falkner, 'Patagonia,' p. 116. See also Rochefort, Iles Antilles,' p. 418 (Caribs).

3 Georgi, 'Reise im Russ. Reich,' vol. i. p. 280; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 488.

trickery. But that the phenomena should be thus artificially excited or dishonestly counterfeited, rather confirms than alters the present argument. Real or simulated, the details of oracle-possession alike illustrate popular belief. The Patagonian wizard begins his performance with drumming and rattling till the real or pretended epileptic fit comes on by the demon entering him, who then answers questions from within him with a faint and mournful voice. Among the wild Veddas of Ceylon, the "devil-dancers" have to work themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspiration whereby they profess to cure their patients. So, with furious dancing to the music and chanting of the attendants, the Bodo priest brings on the fit of maniacal inspiration in which the deity fills him and gives oracles through him.3 In Kamchatka the female shamans, when Billukai came down into them in a thunderstorm, would prophesy; or, receiving spirits with a cry of "hush!" their teeth chattered as in fever, and they were ready to divine.* Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the "natzo" or conjuror is sent for to a sick patient, he calls on his "nat' demon, the soul of a deceased foreign prince, who descends into him and gives the required answers. In the Pacific Islands, spirits of the dead would enter for a time the body of a living man, inspiring him to declare future events, or to execute some commission from the higher deities. The symptoms of oracular possession among savages have been especially well described in this region of the world. The Fijian priest sits looking steadfastly at a whale's tooth ornament, amid dead silence. In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs come on, which increase to strong convulsions, with swelling of the veins, murmurs and sobs. Now the god has entered

1 Falkner, 1. c.

or

2 Tennent, 'Ceylon,' vol. ii. p. 441. See Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 469. 3 Hodgson, Abor. of India,' p. 172.

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Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 278.

Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 328, see vol. iii. p. 201, 'Psychologie,' r. 139. See also Römer, Guinea,' p. 59.

him, and with eyes rolling and protruding, unnatural voice, pale face and livid lips, sweat streaming from every pore, and the whole aspect of a furious madman, he gives the divine answer, and then, the symptoms subsiding, he looks round with a vacant stare, and the deity returns to the land of spirits. In the Sandwich Islands, where the god Oro thus gave his oracles, his priest ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but with his limbs convulsed, his features distorted and terrific, his eyes wild and strained, he would roll on the ground foaming at the mouth, and reveal the will of the possessing god in shrill cries and sounds violent and indistinct, which the attending priests duly interpreted to the people. In Tahiti, it was often noticed that men who in the natural state showed neither ability nor eloquence, would in such convulsive delirium. burst forth into earnest lofty declamation, declaring the will and answers of the gods, and prophesying future events, in well-knit harangues full of the poetic figure and metaphor of the professional orator. But when the fit was over, and sober reason returned, the prophet's gifts were gone.1 Lastly, the accounts of oracular possession in Africa show the primitive ventriloquist in perfect types of morbid knavery. In Sofala, after a king's funeral, his soul would enter into a sorcerer, and speaking in the familiar tones that all the bystanders recognized, would give counsel to the new monarch how to govern his people. About a century ago, a negro fetish-woman of Guinea is thus described in the act of answering an enquirer who has come to consult her. She is crouching on the earth, with her head between her knees and her hands up to her face, till, becoming inspired by the fetish, she snorts and foams and gasps. Then the suppliant may put his question, “Will my friend or brother get well of this sickness?"— What shall I give thee to set him free from his sickness?" and so

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1 Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. pp. 352, 373; Moerenhout, Voyage,' vol. i. p. 479; Mariner, 'Tonga Islands,' vol. i. p. 105; Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 373. Dos Santos, 'Ethiopia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 686.

forth.

Then the fetish-woman answers in a thin, whistling voice, and with the old-fashioned idioms of generations past; and thus the suppliant receives his command, perhaps to kill a white cock and put him at a four-cross way, or tie him up for the fetish to come and fetch him, or perhaps merely to drive a dozen wooden pegs into the ground, so to bury his friend's disease with them.1

The details of demoniacal possession among barbaric and civilized nations need no elaborate description, so simply do they continue the savage cases. But the state of things we notice here agrees with the conclusion that the possessiontheory belongs originally to the lower culture, and is gradually superseded by higher medical knowledge. Surveying its course through the middle and higher civilization, we shall notice first a tendency to limit it to certain peculiar and severe affections, especially connected with mental disorder, such as epilepsy, hysteria, delirium, idiocy, madness; and after this a tendency to abandon it altogether, in consequence of the persistent opposition of the medical faculty. Among the nations of South-East Asia, obsession and possession by demons is strong at least in popular belief. The Chinese attacked with dizziness, or loss of the use of his limbs, or other unaccountable disease, knows that he has been influenced by a malignant demon, or punished for some offence by a deity whose name he will mention, or affected by his wife of a former existence, whose spirit has after a long search discovered him. Exorcism of course exists, and when the evil spirit or influence is expelled, it is especially apt to enter some person standing near; hence the common saying, "idle spectators should not be present at an exorcism." Divination by possessed mediums is usual in China among such is the professional woman who sits at a table in contemplation, till the soul of a deceased person from whom 1 Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 57. See also Steinhauser, 1. c. pp. 132, 139; J. B. Schlegel, 'Ewe-Sprache,' p. xvi.

2 Details from Tatar races in Castrén, Finn. Myth.' pp. 164, 173, etc. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 90; from Abyssinia in Parkyns, 'Life in A.,' ch xxxiii.

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