The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)

(Munich, 1912), p. 104.] If our interpretation of these customs is right, it was the ghost of his murdered sister whom the Roman hero gave the slip to by passing under the yoke; and it may have been the angry ghosts of slaughtered Romans from whom the enemy's soldiers were believed to be delivered when they marched under the yoke before being dismissed by their merciful conquerors to their homes.

Similarly the passage of a victorious Roman army under a triumphal arch may have been intended to purify the men from the stain of bloodshed by interposing a barrier between the slayers and the angry ghosts of the slain.

In a former part of this work we saw that homicides in general and victorious warriors in particular are often obliged to perform a variety of ceremonies for the purpose of ridding them of the dangerous ghosts of their victims.[537 - Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, pp. 165 sqq.] If the ceremony of passing under the yoke was primarily designed, as I have suggested, to free the soldiers from the angry ghosts of the men whom they had slain, we should expect to find that the victorious Romans themselves observed a similar ceremony after a battle for a similar purpose. Was this the original meaning of passing under a triumphal arch? In other words, may not the triumphal arch have been for the victors what the yoke was for the vanquished, a barrier to protect them against the pursuit of the spirits of the slain? That the Romans felt the need of purification from the taint of bloodshed after a battle appears from the opinion of Masurius, mentioned by Pliny, that the laurel worn by soldiers in a triumphal procession was intended to purge them from the slaughter of the enemy.[538 - Pliny, Natur. Histor. xv. 135: “Quia suffimentum sit caedis hostium et purgatio.”] A special gate, the Porta Triumphalis, was reserved for the entrance of a victorious army into Rome;[539 - Cicero, In Pisonem, xxiii. 55; Josephus, Bellum Judaicum, vii. 5. 4.] and it would be in accordance with ancient religious views if this distinction was originally not so much an honour conferred as a precaution enforced to prevent the ordinary gates from being polluted by the passage of thousands of blood-guilty men.[540 - It was not till after I had given this conjectural explanation of the “Sister's Beam” and the triumphal arch at Rome that I read the article of Mr. W. Warde Fowler, “Passing under the Yoke” (The Classical Review, March 1913, pp. 48-51), in which he quite independently suggests practically the same explanation of both these Roman structures. I have left my exposition, except for one or two trivial verbal changes, exactly as it stood before I was aware that my friend had anticipated me in both conjectures. The closeness of the coincidence between our views is a welcome confirmation of their truth. As to the Porta Triumphalis, the exact position of which is uncertain, Mr. Warde Fowler thinks that it was not a gate in the walls, but an archway standing by itself in the Campus Martius outside the city walls. He points out that in the oldest existing triumphal arch, that of Augustus at Ariminum, the most striking part of the structure consists of two upright Corinthian pillars with an architrave laid horizontally across them; and he ingeniously conjectures that we have here a reminiscence of the two uprights and the cross-piece, which, if our theory is correct, was the original form both of the triumphal arch and of the yoke.]

§ 3. The External Soul in Animals

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.

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.[541 - Professor V. M. Mikhailoviskij, “Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxiv. (1895) pp. 133, 134.] 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.[542 - Th. Parkinson, Yorkshire Legends and Traditions, Second Series (London, 1889), pp. 160 sq.] 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.[543 - See above, vol. i. pp. 315 sqq.] 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.”[544 - B. F. Matthes, Makassaarsch-Hollandsch Woordenboek (Amsterdam, 1859), s. v.soemāñgá, p. 569; G. A. Wilken, “Het animisme bij de volken van den Indischen Archipel,” De Indische Gids, June 1884, p. 933; id., Verspreide Geschriften (The Hague, 1912), iii. 12.]

Melanesian conception of the tamaniu, a person's external soul lodged in an animal or other object.

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.”[545 - R. H. Codrington, D.D., The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891), pp. 250 sq. Compare id., “Notes on the Customs of Mota, Banks Islands,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, xvi. (1880) p. 136.]

Sympathetic relation between a man and his tamaniu(external soul).

From this account, which we owe to the careful and accurate researches of the Rev. 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.[546 - W. H. R. Rivers, “Totemism in Polynesia and Melanesia,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, xxxix. (1909) p. 177. Dr. Rivers cites a recent case of a man who had a large lizard for his tamaniu. The animal lived in the roots of a big banyan-tree; when the man was ill, the lizard also seemed unwell; and when the man died, the tree fell, which was deemed a sign that the lizard also was dead.]

Soul of a Melanesian doctor in an eagle-hawk and a rat.

In Melanesia a native doctor was once attending to a sick man. Just then “a large eagle-hawk came soaring past the house, and Kaplen, my hunter, was going to shoot it; but the doctor jumped up in evident alarm, and said, ‘Oh, don't shoot; that is my spirit’ (niog, literally, my shadow); ‘if you shoot that, I will die.’ He then told the old man, ‘If you see a rat to-night, don't drive it away, 'tis my spirit (niog), or a snake which will come to-night, that also is my spirit.’ ”[547 - George Brown, D.D., Melanesians and Polynesians (London, 1910), p. 177. The case was known to Dr. Brown, who made notes of it. The part of Melanesia where it happened was probably the Duke of York Island or New Britain.] It does not appear whether the doctor in this case, like the giant or warlock in the tales, kept his spirit permanently in the bird or in the animal, or whether he only transferred it temporarily to the creature for the purpose of enabling him the better to work the cure, perhaps by sending out his own soul in a bird or beast to find and bring back the lost soul of the patient. In either case he seems to have thought, like the giant or warlock in the stories, that the death of the bird or the animal would simultaneously entail his own. A family in Nauru, one of the Marshall Islands, apparently imagine that their lives are bound up with a species of large fish, which has a huge mouth and devours human beings; for when one of these fish was killed, the members of the family cried, “Our guardian spirit is killed, now we must all die!”[548 - “Totemismus auf den Marshall-Inseln (Südsee),” Anthropos, viii. (1913) p. 251.]

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.

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.[549 - Much of the following evidence has already been cited by me in Totemism and Exogamy, ii. 593 sqq.] 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.[550 - Herbert Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals (London, 1890), p. 53.] 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.[551 - Notes Analytiques sur les Collections ethnographiques du Musée du Congo, i. (Brussels, 1902-1906) p. 150.] 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.[552 - Father H. Trilles, “Chez les Fangs,” Les Missions Catholiques, xxx. (1898) p. 322; id., Le Totémisme chez les Fâṅ (Münster i. W. 1912), pp. 473 sq.] 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.[553 - Father H. Trilles, Le Totémisme chez les Fâṅ (Münster i. W. 1912), pp. 167 sq., 438 sq., 484-489. The description of the rite of blood-brotherhood contracted with the animal is quoted by Father Trilles (pp. 486 sq.) from a work by Mgr. Buléon, Sous le ciel d'Afrique, Récits d'un Missionnaire, pp. 88 sqq. Father Trilles's own observations and enquiries confirm the account given by Mgr. Buléon. But the story of an alliance contracted between a man or woman and a ferocious wild beast and cemented by the blood of the high contracting parties is no doubt a mere fable devised by wizards and witches in order to increase their reputation by imposing on the credulity of the simple.]

Belief of the natives of the Cross River that they stand in a vital relation to certain wild animals, so that when the animal dies the man dies also.

Similar beliefs are held by the natives of the Cross River valley within the German provinces of the Cameroons. Groups of people, generally the inhabitants of a village, have chosen various animals, with which they believe themselves to stand on a footing of intimate friendship or relationship. Amongst such animals are hippopotamuses, elephants, leopards, crocodiles, gorillas, fish, and serpents, all of them creatures which are either very strong or can easily hide themselves in the water or a thicket. This power of concealing themselves is said to be an indispensable condition of the choice of animal familiars, since the animal friend or helper is expected to injure his owner's enemy by stealth; for example, if he is a hippopotamus, he will bob up suddenly out of the water and capsize the enemy's canoe. Between the animals and their human friends or kinsfolk such a sympathetic relation is supposed to exist that the moment the animal dies the man dies also, and similarly the instant the man perishes so does the beast. From this it follows that the animal kinsfolk may never be shot at or molested for fear of injuring or killing the persons whose lives are knit up with the lives of the brutes. This does not, however, prevent the people of a village, who have elephants for their animal friends, from hunting elephants. For they do not respect the whole species but merely certain individuals of it, which stand in an intimate relation to certain individual men and women; and they imagine that they can always distinguish these brother elephants from the common herd of elephants which are mere elephants and nothing more. The recognition indeed is said to be mutual. When a hunter, who has an elephant for his friend, meets a human elephant, as we may call it, the noble animal lifts up a paw and holds it before his face, as much as to say, “Don't shoot.” Were the hunter so inhuman as to fire on and wound such an elephant, the person whose life was bound up with the elephant would fall ill.[554 - Alfred Mansfeld, Urwald-Dokumente, vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kameruns (Berlin, 1908), pp. 220 sq.]

Similar belief of the Balong in the Cameroons.

The Balong of the Cameroons think that every man has several souls, of which one is in his body and another in an animal, such as an elephant, a wild pig, a leopard, and so forth. When a man comes home, feeling ill, and says, “I shall soon die,” and dies accordingly, the people aver that one of his souls has been killed in a wild pig or a leopard, and that the death of the external soul has caused the death of the soul in his body. Hence the corpse is cut open, and a diviner determines, from an inspection of the inwards, whether the popular surmise is correct or not.[555 - J. Keller (missionary), “Ueber das Land und Volk der Balong,” Deutsches Kolonialblatt, 1 Oktober 1895, p. 484; H. Seidel, “Ethnographisches aus Nordost Kamerun,” Globus, lxix. (1896) p. 277.]

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

A similar belief in the external souls of living people is entertained by the Ibos, an important tribe of the Niger delta, who inhabit a country west of the Cross River. 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.[556 - John Parkinson, “Note on the Asaba People (Ibos) of the Niger,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxvi. (1906) pp. 314 sq.] 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.”[557 - Charles Partridge, Cross River Natives (London, 1905), pp. 225 sq.]

Belief of the negroes of Calabar that every person has an external or bush soul lodged in a wild beast.

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.[558 - Miss Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London, 1897), pp. 459-461. The lamented authoress was kind enough to give me in conversation (1st June 1897) some details which do not appear in her book; among these are the statements, which I have embodied in the text, that the bush soul is never a domestic animal, and that when a man knows what kind of creature his bush soul is, he will not kill an animal of that species and will strongly object to any one else doing so. Miss Kingsley was not able to say whether persons who have the same sort of bush soul are allowed or forbidden to marry each other.]

Further particulars as to the Calabar belief in bush souls.

Such is the account which Miss Kingsley gives of the bush souls of the Calabar negroes. Some fresh particulars are furnished by Mr. Richard Henshaw, Agent for Native Affairs at Calabar. He tells us that a man may only marry a woman who has the same sort of bush soul as himself; for example, if his bush soul is a leopard, his wife also must have a leopard for her bush soul. Further, we learn from Mr. Henshaw that a person's bush soul need not be that either of his father or of his mother. For example, a child with a hippopotamus for his bush soul may be born into a family, all the members of which have wild pigs for their bush souls; this happens when the child is a reincarnation of a man whose external soul was a hippopotamus. In such a case, if the parents object to the intrusion of an alien soul, they may call in a medicine-man to check its growth and finally abolish it altogether, after which they will give the child their own bush soul. Or they may leave the matter over till the child comes of age, when he will choose a bush soul for himself with the help of a medicine-man, who will also select the piece of bush or water in which the chosen animal lives. When a man dies, then the animal which contains his external soul “becomes insensible and quite unconscious of the approach of danger. Thus a hunter can capture or kill him with perfect ease.” Sacrifices are often offered to prevent other people from killing the animal in which a man's bush soul resides. The tribes of Calabar which hold these beliefs as to the bush soul are the Efik and Ekoi.[559 - John Parkinson, “Notes on the Efik Belief in ‘Bush-soul,’ ” Man, vi. (1906) pp. 121 sq., No. 80. Mr. Henshaw is a member of the highest grade of the secret society of Egbo.] The belief of the Calabar negroes in the external soul has been described as follows by a missionary: “Ukpong is the native word we have taken to translate our word soul. It primarily signifies the shadow of a person. It also signifies that which dwells within a man on which his life depends, but which may detach itself from the body, and visiting places and persons here and there, again return to its abode in the man… Besides all this, the word is used to designate an animal possessed of an ukpong, so connected with a person's ukpong, that they mutually act upon each other. When the leopard, or crocodile, or whatever animal may be a man's ukpong, gets sick or dies, the like thing happens to him. Many individuals, it is believed, have the power of changing themselves into the animals which are their ukpong.”[560 - Rev. Hugh Goldie, Calabar and its Mission, New Edition (Edinburgh and London, 1901), pp. 51 sq. Compare Major A. G. Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes (London, 1906), p. 217: “When Efik or waterside Ibo see a dead fish floating in the water of the kind called Edidim by the former and Elili by the latter – a variety of the electric species – they believe it to be a bad omen, generally signifying that some one belonging to the house will die, the man who first sees it becoming the victim according to Ibo belief. The only reason that is assigned for this lugubrious forecast is the fact that one of the souls of the departed is in the dead fish – that, in fact, the relationship or affinity existing between the soul essence that had animated the fish and that of one of the members of the household was so intimate that the death of the one was bound to effect the death of the other.”]

Belief of the Ekoi of Southern Nigeria in external souls lodged in animals. Case of a chief whose external soul was in a buffalo.

Among the Ekoi of the Oban district, in Southern Nigeria, it is usual to hear a person say of another that he or she “possesses” such and such an animal, meaning that the person has the power to assume the shape of that particular creature. It is their belief that by constant practice and by virtue of certain hereditary secrets a man can quit his human body and put on that of a wild beast. They say that in addition to the soul which animates his human body everybody has a bush soul which at times he can send forth to animate the body of the creature which he “possesses.” When he wishes his bush soul to go out on its rambles, he drinks a magic potion, the secret of which has been handed down from time immemorial, and some of which is always kept ready for use in an ancient earthen pot set apart for the purpose. No sooner has he drunk the mystic draught than his bush soul escapes from him and floats away invisible through the town into the forest. There it begins to swell and, safe in the shadow of the trees, takes on the shape of the man's animal double, it may be an elephant, a leopard, a buffalo, a wild boar, or a crocodile. Naturally the potion differs according to the kind of animal into which a man is temporarily converted. It would be absurd, for example, to expect that the dose which turns you into an elephant should also be able to turn you into a crocodile; the thing is manifestly impossible. A great advantage of these temporary conversions of a man into a beast is that it enables the convert in his animal shape to pay out his enemy without being suspected. If, for example, you have a grudge at a man who is a well-to-do farmer, all that you have to do is to turn yourself by night into a buffalo, an elephant, or a wild boar, and then, bursting into his fields, stamp about in them till you have laid the standing crops level with the ground. That is why in the neighbourhood of large well-tilled farms, people prefer to keep their bush souls in buffaloes, elephants, and wild boars, because these animals are the most convenient means of destroying a neighbour's crops. Whereas where the farms are small and ill-kept, as they are round about Oban, it is hardly worth a man's while to take the trouble of turning into a buffalo or an elephant for the paltry satisfaction of rooting up a few miserable yams or such like trash. So the Oban people keep their bush souls in leopards and crocodiles, which, though of little use for the purpose of destroying a neighbour's crops, are excellent for the purpose of killing the man himself first and eating him afterwards. But the power of turning into an animal has this serious disadvantage that it lays you open to the chance of being wounded or even slain in your animal skin before you have time to put it off and scramble back into your human integument. A remarkable case of this sort happened only a few miles from Oban not long ago. To understand it you must know that the chiefs of the Ododop tribe, who live about ten miles from Oban, keep their bush souls, whenever they are out on a ramble, in the shape of buffaloes. Well, one day the District Commissioner at Oban saw a buffalo come down to drink at a stream which runs through his garden. He shot at the beast and hit it, and it ran away badly wounded. At the very same moment the head chief of the Ododop tribe, ten miles away, clapped his hand to his side and said, “They have killed me at Oban.” Death was not instantaneous, for the buffalo lingered in pain for a couple of days in the forest, but an hour or two before its dead body was discovered by the trackers the chief expired. Just before he died, with touching solicitude he sent a message warning all people who kept their external souls in buffaloes to profit by his sad fate and beware of going near Oban, which was not a safe place for them. Naturally, when a man keeps his external soul from time to time in a beast, say in a wild cow, he is not so foolish as to shoot an animal of that particular sort, for in so doing he might perhaps be killing himself. But he may kill animals in which other people keep their external souls. For example, a wild cow man may freely shoot an antelope or a wild boar; but should he do so and then have reason to suspect that the dead beast is the animal double of somebody with whom he is on friendly terms, he must perform certain ceremonies over the carcase and then hurry home, running at the top of his speed, to administer a particular medicine to the man whom he has unintentionally injured. In this way he may possibly be in time to save the life of his friend from the effects of the deplorable accident.[561 - P. Amaury Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush (London, 1912), pp. 80-87. The Ekoi name for a man who has the power of sending out his spirit into the form of some animal is efumi (id., p. 71 note). A certain chief named Agbashan, a great elephant hunter, is believed to have the power of transforming himself into an elephant; and “a man of considerable intelligence, educated in England, the brother of a member of the Legislative Council for one of the West African Colonies, offered to take oath that he had seen Agbashan not only in his elephant form, but while actually undergoing the metamorphosis” (id., pp. 82 sq.). In this case, therefore, the man seems to have felt no scruples at hunting the animals in one of which his own bush soul might be lodged.]

Belief of other tribes of Nigeria in external souls lodged in animals.

Near Eket in North Calabar there is a sacred lake, the fish of which are carefully preserved because the people believe that their own souls are lodged in the fish, and that with every fish killed a human life would be simultaneously extinguished.[562 - Letter of Mr. P. Amaury Talbot to me, dated Eket, North Calabar, Southern Nigeria, April 3d, 1913.] In the Calabar River not very many years ago there used to be a huge old crocodile, popularly supposed to contain the external soul of a chief who resided in the flesh at Duke Town. Sporting vice-consuls used from time to time to hunt the animal, and once a peculiarly energetic officer contrived to hit it. Forthwith the chief was laid up with a wound in his leg. He gave out that a dog had bitten him, but no doubt the wise shook their heads and refused to be put off with so flimsy a pretext.[563 - Miss Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London, 1897), pp. 538 sq.] Again, among several tribes on the banks of the Niger between Lokoja and the delta there prevails “a belief in the possibility of a man possessing an alter ego in the form of some animal such as a crocodile or a hippopotamus. It is believed that such a person's life is bound up with that of the animal to such an extent that, whatever affects the one produces a corresponding impression upon the other, and that if one dies the other must speedily do so too. It happened not very long ago that an Englishman shot a hippopotamus close to a native village; the friends of a woman who died the same night in the village demanded and eventually obtained five pounds as compensation for the murder of the woman.”[564 - C. H. Robinson, Hausaland (London, 1896), pp. 36 sq.] Among the Montols of Northern Nigeria, “in many of the compounds there will be found a species of snake, of a non-poisonous sort, which, when full grown, attains a length of about five feet and a girth of eight or nine inches. These snakes live in and about the compound. They are not specially fed by the people of the place, nor are places provided for them to nest in. They live generally in the roofs of the small granaries and huts that make up the compound. They feed upon small mammals, and no doubt serve a useful purpose in destroying vermin which might otherwise eat the stored grain. They are not kept for the purpose of destroying vermin, however. The Montols believe that at the birth of every individual of their race, male and female, one of these snakes, of the same sex, is also born. If the snake be killed, his human partner in life dies also and at the same time. If the wife of a compound-owner gives birth to a son, shortly after the interesting event, the snake of the establishment will be seen with a young one of corresponding sex. From the moment of birth, these two, the snake and the man, share a life of common duration, and the measure of the one is the measure of the other. Hence every care is taken to protect these animals from injury, and no Montol would in any circumstances think of injuring or killing one. It is said that a snake of this kind never attempts any injury to a man. There is only one type of snake thus regarded.”[565 - J. F. J. Fitzpatrick (Assistant Resident, Northern Nigeria), “Some Notes on the Kwolla District and its Tribes,” Journal of the African Society, No. 37, October, 1910, p. 30.] Among the Angass, of the Kanna District in Northern Nigeria, “when a man is born, he is endowed with two distinct entities, life and a kurua (Arabic rin)… When the rin enters a man, its counterpart enters some beast or snake at the same time, and if either dies, so also does the body containing the counterpart. This, however, in no wise prevents a man from killing any game, etc., he may see, though he knows full well that he is causing thereby the death of some man or woman. When a man dies, his life and rin both leave him, though the latter is asserted sometimes to linger near the place of death for a day or two.”[566 - Extract from a Report by Captain Foulkes to the British Colonial Office. My thanks are due to Mr. N. W. Thomas for sending me the extract and to the authorities of the Colonial Office for their permission to publish it.] Again, at the town of Paha, in the northern territory of the Gold Coast, there are pools inhabited by crocodiles which are worshipped by the people. The natives believe that for every death or birth in the town a similar event takes place among the crocodiles.[567 - The Daily Graphic, Tuesday, October 7th, 1902, p. 3.]

The conception of an external soul lodged in an animal appears to be absent in South Africa.

In South Africa the conception of an external soul deposited in an animal, which is so common in West Africa, appears to be almost unknown; at least I have met with no clear traces of it in literature. The Bechuanas, indeed, commonly believe that if a man wounds a crocodile, the man will be ill as long as the crocodile is ill of its wound, and that if the crocodile dies, the man dies too. This belief is not, apparently, confined to the Bechuana clan which has the crocodile for its totem, but is shared by all the other clans; all of them certainly hold the crocodile in respect.[568 - Rev. W. C. Willoughby, “Notes on the Totemism of the Becwana,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxv. (1905) p. 300. The writer adds that he found a similar belief as to the sympathetic relation between a wounded crocodile and the man who wounded it very general among the Wanyamwezi, who, in 1882, were living under Mirambo about two hundred miles south of Lake Victoria Nyanza and a hundred miles east of Lake Tanganyika.] It does not appear whether the sympathetic relation between a man and a crocodile is supposed by the Bechuanas to be lifelong, or only to arise at the moment when the man wounds the animal; in the latter case the shedding of the crocodile's blood might perhaps be thought to establish a relationship of affinity or sympathy between the two. The Zulus believe that every man is attended by an ancestral spirit (ihlozi, or rather idhlozi) in the form of a serpent, “which specially guards and helps him, lives with him, wakes with him, sleeps and travels with him, but always under ground. If it ever makes its appearance, great is the joy, and the man must seek to discover the meaning of its appearance. He who has no ihlozi must die. Therefore if any one kills an ihlozi serpent, the man whose ihlozi it was dies, but the serpent comes to life again.”[569 - F. Speckmann, Die Hermannsburger Mission in Africa (Hermannsburg, 1876) p. 167. Compare David Leslie, Among the Zulus and Amatongas, Second Edition (Edinburgh, 1875) pp. 47 sq.; “The Kaffirs believe that after death their spirits turn into a snake, which they call Ehlose, and that every living man has two of these familiar spirits – a good and a bad. When everything they undertake goes wrong with them, such as hunting, cattle-breeding, etc., they say they know that it is their enemies who are annoying them, and that they are only to be appeased by sacrificing an animal; but when everything prospers, they ascribe it to their good Ehlose being in the ascendant”; id., op. cit. p. 148: “When in battle two men are fighting, their snakes (Mahloze) are poetically said to be twisting and biting each other overhead. One ‘softens’ and goes down, and the man, whose attendant it is, goes down with it. Everything is ascribed to Ehlose. If he fails in anything, his Ehlose is bad; if successful, it is good… It is this thing which is the inducing cause of everything. In fact, nothing in Zulu is admitted to arise from natural causes; everything is ascribed to witchcraft or the Ehlose.”It is not all serpents that are amadhlozi (plural of idhlozi), that is, are the transformed spirits of the dead. Serpents which are dead men may easily be distinguished from common snakes, for they frequent huts; they do not eat mice, and they are not afraid of people. If a man in his life had a scar, his serpent after his death will also have a scar; if he had only one eye, his serpent will have only one eye; if he was lame, his serpent will be lame too. That is how you can recognise So-and-So in his serpent form. Chiefs do not turn into the same kind of snakes as ordinary people. For common folk become harmless snakes with green and white bellies and very small heads; but kings become boa-constrictors or the large and deadly black mamba. See Rev. Henry Callaway, M.D., The Religions System of the Amazulu, Part ii. (Capetown, London, etc., 1869) pp. 134 sq., 140, 196-202, 205, 208-211, 231. “The Ehlose of Chaka and other dead kings is the Boa-constrictor, or the large and deadly black Mamba, whichever the doctors decide. That of dead Queens is the tree Iguana” (David Leslie, op. cit. p. 213). Compare Rev. Joseph Shooter, The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country (London, 1857), pp. 161 sq.; W. R. Gordon, “Words about Spirits,” (South African) Folk-lore Journal, ii. (Cape Town, 1880) pp. 101-103; W. Grant, “Magato and his Tribe,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxv. (1905) p. 270. A word which is sometimes confounded with idhlozi is itongo (plural amatongo); but the natives themselves when closely questioned distinguish between the two. See Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood, a Study of Kafir Children (London, 1906), pp. 14 sq., 281-286. The notion that the spirits of the dead appear in the form of serpents is widespread in Africa. See Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Second Edition, pp. 73 sqq. Dr. F. B. Jevons has suggested that the Roman genius, the guardian-spirit which accompanied a man from birth to death (Censorinus, De die natali, 3) and was commonly represented in the form of a snake, may have been an external soul. See F. B. Jevons, Plutarch's Romane Questions (London, 1892) pp. xlvii. sq.; id., Introduction to the History of Religion (London, 1896), pp. 186 sq.; L. Preller, Römische Mythologie

(Berlin, 1881-1883), ii. 195 sqq.; G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer

(Munich, 1912), pp. 176 sq.] But the conception of a dead ancestor incarnate in a snake, on which the welfare or existence of one of his living descendants depends, is rather that of a guardian spirit than of an external soul.

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.

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.[570 - H. H. Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific Coast (London, 1875-1876), i. 661. The words quoted by Bancroft (p. 662, note), “Consérvase entre ellos la creencia de que su vida está unida à la de un animal, y que es forzoso que mueran ellos cuando éste muere,” are not quite accurately represented by the statement of Bancroft in the text. Elsewhere (vol. ii. p. 277) the same writer calls the “second self” of the Zapotecs a “nagual, or tutelary genius,” adding that the fate of the child was supposed to be so intimately bound up with the fortune of the animal that the death of the one involved the death of the other. Compare Daniel G. Brinton, “Nagualism, a Study in American Folk-lore and History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia, vol. xxxiii. No. 144 (Philadelphia, January, 1894), pp. 11-73. According to Professor E. Seler the word nagual is akin to the Mexican naualli, “a witch or wizard,” which is derived from a word meaning “hidden” with reference to the power attributed to sorcerers of transforming themselves into animals. See E. Seler, “Altmexikanische Studien, II.” Veröffentlichungen aus dem Königlichen Museum für Völkerkunde, vi. heft 2/4 (Berlin, 1899), pp. 52-57.] 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.”[571 - Otto Stoll, Die Ethnologie der Indianerstämme von Guatemala (Leyden, 1889), p. 57.] 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.”[572 - Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies, Third Edition (London, 1677), p. 334. The same writer relates how a certain Indian named Gonzalez was reported to have the power of turning himself into a lion or rather a puma. Once when a Spaniard had shot a puma in the nose, Gonzalez was found with a bruised face and accused the Spaniard of having shot him. Another Indian chief named Gomez was said to have transformed himself into a puma, and in that shape to have fought a terrific battle with a rival chief named Lopez, who had changed himself into a jaguar. See Gage, op. cit. pp. 383-389.] 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.”[573 - Antonio de Herrera, General History of the Vast Continent and Islands of America, translated by Capt. John Stevens (London, 1725-1726), iv. 138 sq. The Spanish original of Herrera's history, a work based on excellent authorities, was first published at Madrid in 1601-1615. The Indians of Santa Catalina Istlavacan still receive at birth the name of some animal, which is commonly regarded as their guardian spirit for the rest of their life. The name is bestowed by the heathen priest, who usually hears of a birth in the village sooner than his Catholic colleague. See K. Scherzer, “Die Indianer von Santa Catalina Istlávacana (Frauenfuss), ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte der Urbewohner Central-Amerikas,” Sitzungsberichte der philos. histor. Classe der kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna), xviii. (1856) p. 235.] 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.[574 - Otto Stoll, Die Ethnologie der Indianerstämme von Guatemala (Leyden, 1889), pp. 57 sq.; id., Suggestion und Hypnotism

(Leipsic, 1904), p. 170.]

In some tribes of South-Eastern Australia the lives of the two sexes are thought to be bound up with the lives of two different kinds of animals, as bats and owls.

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 Yártatgŭrk (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.”[575 - A. W. Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xviii. (1889) pp. 57 sq. Compare id., Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London, 1904), pp. 148, 150. It is very remarkable that among the Kurnai these fights had a special connexion with marriage. When young men were backward of taking wives, the women used to go out into the forest and kill an emu-wren, which was the men's “brother”; then returning to the camp they shewed the dead bird to the men. The result was a fight between the young men and the young women, in which, however, lads who were not yet marriageable might not take part. Next day the marriageable young men went out and killed a superb warbler, which was the women's “sister,” and this led to a worse fight than before. Some days afterwards, when the wounds and bruises were healed, one of the marriageable young men met one of the marriageable young women, and said, “Superb warbler!” She answered, “Emu-wren! What does the emu-wren eat?” To which the young man answered, “He eats so-and-so,” naming kangaroo, opossum, emu, or some other game. Then they laughed, and she ran off with him without telling any one. See L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane, 1880), pp. 201 sq.; A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, pp. 149, 273 sq. Perhaps this killing of the sex-totem before marriage may be related to the pretence of killing young men and bringing them to life again at puberty. See below, pp. 225 (#x_17_i9)sqq.] 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.”[576 - Gerard Krefft, “Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Lower Murray and Darling,” Transactions of the Philosophical Society of New South Wales, 1862-65, pp. 359 sq.] 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.[577 - A. W. Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xviii. (1889) pp. 56 sq.] 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.”[578 - A. W. Howitt, op. cit. p. 57; id., Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 150.] 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.”[579 - A. W. Howitt, “On the Migrations of the Kurnai Ancestors,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xv. (1886) p. 416.] 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.”[580 - C. W. Schürmann, “The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln,” in Native Tribes of South Australia (Adelaide, 1879), p. 241. Compare G. F. Angas, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (London, 1847), i. 109.] 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.[581 - A. W. Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xviii. (1889) p. 58. Compare id., Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London, 1904), pp. 148-151.] 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.”[582 - James Dawson, Australian Aborigines (Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide, 1881), p. 52.]

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

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)[583 - See Totemism and Exogamy, i. 47 sq. It is at least remarkable that both the creatures thus assigned to the two sexes should be nocturnal in their habits. Perhaps the choice of such creatures is connected with the belief that the soul is absent from the body in slumber. On this hypothesis bats and owls would be regarded by these savages as the wandering souls of sleepers. Such a belief would fully account for the reluctance of the natives to kill them. The Kiowa Indians of North America think that owls and other night birds are animated by the souls of the dead. See James Mooney, “Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians,” Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Part i. (Washington, 1898) p. 237.] 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.[584 - A. L. P. Cameron, “Notes on some Tribes of New South Wales,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiv. (1885) p. 350 note 1; A. W. Howitt, “On the Migrations of the Kurnai Ancestors,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xv. (1886) p. 416; id., “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xviii. (1889) p. 57.] 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.[585 - L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 194, 201, sq., 215; Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xv. 416, xviii. 56 sq.; A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London, 1904), pp. 148-151.]

§ 4. A Suggested Theory of Totemism.[586 - The following suggestion as to the origin of totemism was made in the first edition of this book (published in 1890) and is here reprinted without any substantial change. In the meantime much additional evidence as to the nature and prevalence of totemism has come to light, and with the new evidence my opinions, or rather conjectures, as to the origin of the institution have repeatedly changed. If I here reprint my earliest conjecture, it is partly because I still think it may contain an element of truth, and partly because it serves as a convenient peg on which to hang a collection of facts which are much more valuable than any theories of mine. The reader who desires to acquaint himself more fully with the facts of totemism and with the theories that have been broached on the subject, will find them stated at length in my Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910). Here I will only call attention to the Arunta legend that the ancestors of the tribe kept their spirits in certain sacred sticks and stones (churinga), which bear a close resemblance to the well-known bull-roarers, and that when they went out hunting they hung these sticks or stones on certain sacred poles (nurtunjas) which represented their totems. See Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1899), pp. 137 sq., 629. This tradition appears to point to a custom of transferring a man's soul or spirit temporarily to his totem. Conversely when an Arunta is sick he scrapes his churinga and swallows the scrapings, as if to restore to himself the spiritual substance deposited in the instrument. See Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, op. cit. p. 135 note 1.]

Sex totems and clan totems may both be based on the notion that men and women keep their external souls in their totems, whether these are animals, plants, or what not.

But when a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem. Accordingly in the tribes of South-Eastern Australia which we have been considering the bat and the owl, the emu-wren and the superb warbler, may properly be described as totems of the sexes. But the assignation of a totem to a sex is comparatively rare, and has hitherto been discovered nowhere but in Australia. Far more commonly the totem is appropriated not to a sex, but to a clan, and is hereditary either in the male or female line. The relation of an individual to the clan totem does not differ in kind from his relation to the sex totem; he will not kill it, he speaks of it as his brother, and he calls himself by its name. Now if the relations are similar, the explanation which holds good of the one ought equally to hold good of the other. Therefore the reason why a clan revere a particular species of animals or plants (for the clan totem may be a plant) and call themselves after it, would seem to be a belief that the life of each individual of the clan is bound up with some one animal or plant of the species, and that his or her death would be the consequence of killing that particular animal, or destroying that particular plant. This explanation of totemism squares very well with Sir George Grey's definition of a totem or kobong in Western Australia. He says: “A certain mysterious connection exists between a family and its kobong, so that a member of the family will never kill an animal of the species to which his kobong belongs, should he find it asleep; indeed he always kills it reluctantly, and never without affording it a chance to escape. This arises from the family belief that some one individual of the species is their nearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime, and to be carefully avoided. Similarly, a native who has a vegetable for his kobong may not gather it under certain circumstances, and at a particular period of the year.”[587 - (Sir) George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia (London, 1841), ii. 228 sq.] Here it will be observed that though each man spares all the animals or plants of the species, they are not all equally precious to him; far from it, out of the whole species there is only one which is specially dear to him; but as he does not know which the dear one is, he is obliged to spare them all from fear of injuring the one. Again, this explanation of the clan totem harmonizes with the supposed effect of killing one of the totem species. “One day one of the blacks killed a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa (crow) [i. e. a man of the Crow clan] named Larry died. He had been ailing for some days, but the killing of his wingong [totem] hastened his death.”[588 - L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 169. According to Dr. Howitt, it is a serious offence to kill the totem of another person “with intent to injure him” (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xviii. (1889) p. 53). Such an intention seems to imply a belief in a sympathetic connexion between the man and the animal. Similarly the Siena of the Ivory Coast, in West Africa, who have totemism, believe that if a man kills one of his totemic animals, a member of his totemic clan dies instantaneously. See Maurice Delafosse, “Le peuple Siéna ou Sénoufo,” Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques, i. (1908) p. 452.] Here the killing of the crow caused the death of a man of the Crow clan, exactly as, in the case of the sex-totems, the killing of a bat causes the death of a Bat-man or the killing of an owl causes the death of an Owl-woman. Similarly, the killing of his nagual causes the death of a Central American Indian, the killing of his bush soul causes the death of a Calabar negro, the killing of his tamaniu causes the death of a Banks Islander, and the killing of the animal in which his life is stowed away causes the death of the giant or warlock in the fairy tale.

The savage may imagine his life to be bound up with that of more animals than one at the same time; for many savages think that every person has more souls than one.

Thus it appears that the story of “The giant who had no heart in his body” may perhaps furnish the key to the relation which is supposed to subsist between a man and his totem. The totem, on this theory, is simply the receptacle in which a man keeps his life, as Punchkin kept his life in a parrot, and Bidasari kept her soul in a golden fish. It is no valid objection to this view that when a savage has both a sex totem and a clan totem his life must be bound up with two different animals, the death of either of which would entail his own. If a man has more vital places than one in his body, why, the savage may think, should he not have more vital places than one outside it? Why, since he can put his life outside himself, should he not transfer one portion of it to one animal and another to another? The divisibility of life, or, to put it otherwise, the plurality of souls, is an idea suggested by many familiar facts, and has commended itself to philosophers like Plato,[589 - According to Plato, the different parts of the soul were lodged in different parts of the body (Timaeus, pp. 69c-72d), and as only one part, on his theory, was immortal, Lucian seems not unnaturally to have interpreted the Platonic doctrine to mean that every man had more than one soul (Demonax, 33).] as well as to savages. It finds favour also with the sages of China, who tell us that every human being is provided with what may be called a male soul (shen) and a female soul (kwei), which by their harmonious co-operation compose an organic unity. However, some Chinese philosophers will have it that each of the five viscera has its own separate male soul (shen); and a Taoist treatise written about the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century has even enriched science with a list of about three dozen souls distributed over the various parts of the human frame; indeed, not content with a bare catalogue of these souls, the learned author has annexed to the name and surname of each a brief description of its size and stature, of the kind of dress in which it is clothed and the shape of hat it wears.[590 - J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, iv. (Leyden, 1901) pp. 3 sq., 70-75.] It is only when the notion of a soul, from being a quasi-scientific hypothesis, becomes a theological dogma that its unity and indivisibility are insisted upon as essential. The savage, unshackled by dogma, is free to explain the facts of life by the assumption of as many souls as he thinks necessary. Hence, for example, the Caribs supposed that there was one soul in the head, another in the heart, and other souls at all the places where an artery is felt pulsating.[591 - Le sieur de la Borde, “Relation de l'Origine, Mœurs, Coustumes, Religion, Guerres et Voyages des Caraibes sauvages des Isles Antilles de l'Amerique,” p. 15, in Recueil de divers Voyages faits en Afrique et en l'Amerique (Paris, 1684).] Some of the Hidatsa Indians explain the phenomena of gradual death, when the extremities appear dead first, by supposing that man has four souls, and that they quit the body, not simultaneously, but one after the other, dissolution being only complete when all four have departed.[592 - Washington Matthews, The Hidatsa Indians (Washington, 1877), p. 50.] Some of the Dyaks of Borneo and the Malays of the Peninsula believe that every man has seven souls.[593 - H. Ling Roth, “Low's Natives of Borneo,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxi. (1892) p. 117; W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic (London, 1900), p. 50.] The Alfoors of Poso in Celebes are of opinion that he has three.[594 - A. C. Kruijt, “Een en ander aangaande het geestelijk en maatschappelijk leven van den Poso-Alfoer,” Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap, xxxix. (1895) pp. 3 sq.] The natives of Laos suppose that the body is the seat of thirty spirits, which reside in the hands, the feet, the mouth, the eyes, and so on.[595 - A. Bastian, Die Völker des östlichen Asien, iii. (Jena, 1867) p. 248.] Hence, from the primitive point of view, it is perfectly possible that a savage should have one soul in his sex totem and another in his clan totem. However, as I have observed, sex totems have been found nowhere but in Australia; so that as a rule the savage who practises totemism need not have more than one soul out of his body at a time.[596 - In some tribes, chiefly of North American Indians, every man has an individual or personal totem in addition to the totem of his clan. This personal totem is usually the animal of which he dreamed during a long and solitary fast at puberty. See Totemism and Exogamy, i. 49-52, iii. 370-456, where the relation of the individual or personal totem (if we may call it so) to the clan totem is discussed. It is quite possible that, as some good authorities incline to believe, the clan totem has been developed out of the personal totem by inheritance. See Miss Alice C. Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, pp. 3 sqq. (paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, August 1887, separate reprint); Fr. Boas, “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Report of the United States National Museum for 1895 (Washington, 1897), pp. 323 sq., 336-338, 393. In the bush souls of the Calabar negroes (see above, pp. 204 sqq.) we seem to have something like the personal totem on its way to become hereditary and so to grow into the totem of a clan.]

The Battas of Sumatra, who have totemism, believe that every person has a soul which is always outside of his body.

If this explanation of the totem as a receptacle in which a man keeps his soul or one of his souls is correct, we should expect to find some totemic people of whom it is expressly said that every man amongst them is believed to keep at least one soul permanently out of his body, and that the destruction of this external soul is supposed to entail the death of its owner. Such a people are the Battas of Sumatra. The Battas are divided into exogamous clans (margas) with descent in the male line; and each clan is forbidden to eat the flesh of a particular animal. One clan may not eat the tiger, another the ape, another the crocodile, another the dog, another the cat, another the dove, another the white buffalo, and another the locust. The reason given by members of a clan for abstaining from the flesh of the particular animal is either that they are descended from animals of that species, and that their souls after death may transmigrate into the animals, or that they or their forefathers have been under certain obligations to the creatures. Sometimes, but not always, the clan bears the name of the animal.[597 - J. B. Neumann, “Het Pane- en Bila-stroomgebied op het eiland Sumatra,” Tijdschrift van het Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, Tweede Serie, dl. iii. Afdeeling, meer uitgebreide artikelen, No. 2 (1886), pp. 311 sq.; id., dl. iv. No. 1 (1887), pp. 8 sq.; Van Hoëvell, “Iets over 't oorlogvoeren der Batta's,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië, N.S., vii. (1878) p. 434; G. A. Wilken, Verspreide Geschriften (The Hague, 1912), i. 296, 306 sq., 309, 325 sq.; L. de Backer, L'Archipel Indien (Paris, 1874), p. 470; Col. Yule, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, ix. (1880) p. 295; Joachim Freiherr von Brenner, Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras (Würzburg, 1894), pp. 197 sqq.; P. A. L. E. van Dijk, “Eenige aanteekeningen omtrent de verschillenden stammen (Margas) en de stamverdeling bij de Battaks,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde, xxxviii. (1895) pp. 296 sq.; M. Joustra, “Naar het landschap Goenoeng,” Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap, xlv. (1901) pp. 80 sq.; id., “Het leven, de zeden en gewoonten der Bataks,” Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap, xlvi. (1902) pp. 387 sqq.; J. E. Neumann, “Kemali, Pantang, en Rĕboe bij de Karo-Bataks,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde, xlviii. (1906) p. 512. See further Totemism and Exogamy, ii. 185 sqq.] Thus the Battas have totemism in full. But, further, each Batta believes that he has seven or, on a more moderate computation, three souls. One of these souls is always outside the body, but nevertheless whenever it dies, however far away it may be at the time, that same moment the man dies also.[598 - B. Hagen, “Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Battareligion,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde, xxviii. (1883) p. 514. J. B. Neumann (op. cit. dl. iii. No. 2, pp. 299) is the authority for the seven souls. According to another writer, six out of the seven souls reside outside of the body; one of them dwells in heaven, the remaining five have no definite place of abode, but are so closely related to the man that were they to abandon him his health would suffer. See J. Freiherr von Brenner, Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras, pp. 239 sq. A different account of Batta psychology is given by Mr. Westenberg. According to him, each Batta has only one tendi (not three or seven of them); and the tendi is something between a soul and a guardian spirit. It always resides outside of the body, and on its position near, before, behind, above, or below, the welfare of its owner is supposed in great measure to depend. But in addition each man has two invisible guardian spirits (his kaka and agi) whose help he invokes in great danger; one is the seed by which he was begotten, the other is the afterbirth, and these he calls respectively his elder and his younger brother. Mr. Westenberg's account refers specially to the Karo-Battas. See C. J. Westenberg, “Aanteekeningen omtrent de godsdienstige begrippen der Karo-Bataks,” Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië, xli. (1892) pp. 228 sq.] The writer who mentions this belief says nothing about the Batta totems; but on the analogy of the Australian, Central American, and African evidence we may conjecture that the external soul, whose death entails the death of the man, is housed in the totemic animal or plant.

If a totem is the receptacle in which a man keeps his external soul, it is no wonder that savages should conceal the secret from strangers.

Against this view it can hardly be thought to militate that the Batta does not in set terms affirm his external soul to be in his totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal or plant of his clan. For if a savage seriously believes that his life is bound up with an external object, it is in the last degree unlikely that he will let any stranger into the secret. In all that touches his inmost life and beliefs the savage is exceedingly suspicious and reserved; Europeans have resided among savages for years without discovering some of their capital articles of faith, and in the end the discovery has often been the result of accident.[599 - Compare Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (London, 1912), ii. 90 sqq.: “An important institution among some of the Ibans, which occurs but in rare instances among the other peoples, is the ngarong or secret helper. The ngarong is one of the very few topics in regard to which the Ibans display any reluctance to speak freely. So great is their reserve in this connection that one of us lived for fourteen years on friendly terms with Ibans of various districts without ascertaining the meaning of the word ngarong, or suspecting the great importance of the part played by the notion in the lives of some of these people. The ngarong seems to be usually the spirit of some ancestor or dead relative, but not always so, and it is not clear that it is always conceived as the spirit of a deceased human being. This spirit becomes the special protector of some individual Iban, to whom in a dream he manifests himself, in the first place in human form, and announces that he will be his secret helper… When, as is most commonly the case, the secret helper takes on the form of some animal, all individuals of that species become objects of especial regard to the fortunate Iban; he will not kill or eat any such animal, and he will as far as possible restrain others from doing so.” Thus the ngarong or secret helper of the Ibans closely resembles what I have called the individual or personal totem.] Above all, the savage lives in an intense and perpetual dread of assassination by sorcery; the most trifling relics of his person – the clippings of his hair and nails, his spittle, the remnants of his food, his very name[600 - It is not merely the personal name which is often shrouded in mystery (see Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, pp. 318 sqq.); the names of the clans and their subdivisions are objects of mysterious reverence among many, if not all, of the Siouan tribes of North America, and are never used in ordinary conversation. See J. Owen Dorsey, “Osage Traditions,” Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, 1888), p. 396. Among the Yuin of South-Eastern Australia “the totem name was called Budjan, and it was said to be more like Joïa, or magic, than a name; and it was in one sense a secret name, for with it an enemy might cause injury to its bearer by magic. Thus very few people knew the totem names of others, the name being told to a youth by his father at his initiation” (A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London, 1904, p. 133).]– all these may, he fancies, be turned by the sorcerer to his destruction, and he is therefore anxiously careful to conceal or destroy them. But if in matters such as these, which are but the outposts and outworks of his life, he is so shy and secretive, how close must be the concealment, how impenetrable the reserve in which he enshrouds the inner keep and citadel of his being! When the princess in the fairy tale asks the giant where he keeps his soul, he often gives false or evasive answers, and it is only after much coaxing and wheedling that the secret is at last wrung from him. In his jealous reticence the giant resembles the timid and furtive savage; but whereas the exigencies of the story demand that the giant should at last reveal his secret, no such obligation is laid on the savage; and no inducement that can be offered is likely to tempt him to imperil his soul by revealing its hiding-place to a stranger. It is therefore no matter for surprise that the central mystery of the savage's life should so long have remained a secret, and that we should be left to piece it together from scattered hints and fragments and from the recollections of it which linger in fairy tales.

§ 5. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection

This view of totemism may help to explain the rite of death and resurrection which forms part of many initiatory ceremonies among savages.