Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

97. Divination

One other Babylonian invention may be cited on account of its curious history. This is the pseudo-science of predicting the outcome of events by examination of the liver of animals sacrificed to the gods. A system of such divination, known as hepatoscopy, was worked out by the Babylonian priests perhaps by 2,000 B.C. Their rules are known from the discovery of ancient clay models of the liver with its several lobes, each part being inscribed with its significance according as it might bear such and such appearance. In some way which is not yet wholly understood, this system was carried, like the true arch, from the Babylonians to the Etruscans. As there are definite ancient traditions which brought the Etruscans into Italy from Asia, the gap is however lessened. The Etruscans, who were evidently addicted to priestly magic, carried on this liver divination alongside another method, that of haruspicy or foretelling from the flight or actions of birds. Both systems were learned from them by the Romans, according to Roman tradition itself.

With the spread of Christianity, hepatoscopy and haruspicy died out in the west. But meanwhile they had been carried in the opposite direction from their Babylonian source of origin, and became established in eastern Asia and finally, in somewhat modified form, among remote uncivilized peoples. The pagan priests of Borneo and the Philippines even to-day are foretelling the future by observing the flight of birds and examining the gall bladder—an organ intimately associated with the liver—of sacrificial animals. If these primitive Malaysian peoples had always remained uninfluenced by higher cultures, their divinatory customs might be imputed to independent invention. They live, however, at no great distance from the Asiatic mainland, and are known to have been subjected to heavy cultural influences from China, Arabia, and especially India. Four centuries ago, to cite only a few specific instances, the Philippine chieftains went under the title of rajah, the Hindu word for king. In the southern Philippine islands there are “sultans” to-day. In all parts of the Philippines as well as Borneo, even among the rude tribes of the interior mountains, Chinese jars imported centuries ago are treasured as precious heirlooms. With these streams of higher culture flowing into the Malaysian islands, the only reasonable conclusion is that the arts of liver and bird divination were also imported. In fact, it seems probable that the broader custom of sacrificing animals to the gods and spirits, a custom to which the pagan Malaysians still adhere, is a part of the same wave of influence from the Orient which has so deeply stamped the Homeric poems and the Old Testament. Although theoretically it is not surprising that hepatoscopy and haruspicy still flourish among some backward and marginally situated peoples, yet, in the concrete and at first blush, it is striking to find that an institution which was active in Babylonia three or four thousand years ago should still maintain an unbroken life in Borneo. Evidently the diffusion principle reaches far and long.

Another method of foretelling, which has spread equally far, although its flow has been mainly from the east westward, is scapulimancy, divination from the cracks that develop in scorched shoulder blades. This seems to have originated in ancient China with the heating of tortoise shells; had spread by the third century after Christ to Japan, where deer shoulder blades were employed; and is found to-day among the Koryak and Chukchi of northeasternmost Siberia, who utilize the same bones from seals and reindeer respectively. Elsewhere domestic animals, above all the sheep, furnish the proper shoulder blade. All the central Asiatic nations as far south as the Tibetans and Lolos are addicted to the custom, which had official status with the Mongol rulers in the thirteenth century, but must have been older, since it was in vogue among the Byzantine Greeks two hundred years earlier. The practice spread over practically all Europe, where it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and still lingers among belated rural populations; to Morocco and perhaps other parts of north Africa; and in Asia to South Arabia, Afghanistan, and westernmost India. Scapulimancy was not known to the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans; it seems not to have penetrated far into India and not at all into the countries and islands to the east of India, which are sheepless regions; and it did not obtain a foothold in North America, where sheep and other tame animals were also not kept. It appears therefore that the custom, after a period of somewhat wavering formation in eastern Asia, crystallized into an association with the domesticated sheep, forming a true culture “complex,” and was then diffused almost as far as this animal.

98. Tobacco

The speed with which inventions sometimes diffuse over large areas is in marked contrast to the slowness with which they travel on other occasions. The art or habit of smoking originated in tropical America where the tobacco plant is indigenous. From this middle region the custom spread, like agriculture, pottery, and weaving, in both directions over most of north and south America. Originally, it would seem, a tobacco leaf was either rolled on itself to form a rude cigar, or was stuffed, cigarette fashion, into a reed or piece of cane. Columbus found the West Indians puffing at cigars. In the Southwestern United States, the natives smoked from hollow reeds. Farther into the United States, both to the east and west, the reed had become a manufactured tube of wood or stone or pottery. This tubular pipe, something like a magnified cigarette holder, has the bowl enlarged at one end to receive the tobacco. It has to be held more or less vertically. This form has survived to the present day among the California Indians. As the tubular pipe spread into the central and eastern United States, it was elaborated. The bowl was made to rise from the top of the pipe, instead of merely forming its end. This proved a convenience, for the pipe had now no longer to be pointed skyward to be smoked. Here then was a pipe with a definite bowl; but its derivation from the straight tubular pipe is shown by the fact that the bowl was most frequently set not at the end of the stem, as we “automatically” think a pipe should be, but near its middle. The bowl evidently represented a secondary addition which there seemed no more reason to place at the end than in the middle of the pipe; and the latter happened to become the fashion.

All this evolution took place at least a thousand years ago, probably much longer. Elaborate stone pipes have been discovered in the earthworks left by the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley, a people whose very existence had been forgotten when the whites first came. Californian stone pipes occur well down toward the bottom of shell mounds estimated to have required three or four thousand years to accumulate.

Here and there this slow diffusion suffered checks. In the Andean region of South America tobacco came into competition with coca, a plant whose leaf was chewed. The effect of the contained alkaloid is to prevent fatigue and hunger. Of the two, coca triumphed over tobacco, possibly because its action is more drug-like. In North America, on the other hand, tribes that had not adopted maize and bean agriculture, sometimes tilled tobacco patches. With them, tobacco cultivation had outstripped the spread of so important an institution as food agriculture. In the extreme parts of North America, climatic factors checked the growth of tobacco, either wild or cultivated. Where the supply was scarce, it was either diluted with pulverized tree bark, as by many tribes of the central United States, or it was eaten, as by a number of groups on the Pacific coast. To these latter, tobacco seemed too precious to set fire to and lightly puff away. They mixed it with lime from burnt shells and swallowed it. Taken in this form, a small quantity produces a powerful effect. In the farthest north of the continent, even this device had not obtained a foothold. The development of intertribal trade was too slender and intermittent for anything but valuables, let alone an article of daily consumption, to be transported over long distances. The result was that the Eskimo, when first discovered, knew nothing of tobacco or pipes.

The use of tobacco was quickly carried to the Old World by the Spaniards, and before long all Europe was smoking. Throughout that continent, irrespective of language, the plant is known by modifications of the Spanish name tabaco, which in turn seems based on a native American name for cigar. By the Spaniards and Portuguese, and later also by the Arabs, the habit of smoking was carried to various points on the shores of Africa, Asia, and the East Indies. Thence it spread inland. Native African tribes, and others in New Guinea, who had never seen a white man, have been found not only growing and smoking tobacco, but firmly believing that their ancestors from time immemorial had done so. This is a characteristic illustration of the short-livedness of group memory and the unreliability of oral tradition.

In northeastern Siberia, where the Russians introduced tobacco, a special form of pipe came into use. It has a narrow bowl flaring at the top. Seen from above, this bowl looks like a disk with a rather small hole in the center. In profile it is almost like a capital T. It is set on the end of the pipe-stem. This stem may be straight or flattened and curved. This form of pipe, along with tobacco as a trade article, crossed Behring Strait and was taken up by the Alaska Eskimo. That this pipe is not of Eskimo origin is shown by its close resemblance to the Chukchi pipe of Siberia. The fact that it is impossible for the Eskimo to grow tobacco corroborates the late introduction, as does the Alaska Eskimo name: tawak. In short, smoking reached the Eskimo only after having made the round of the globe. Originating in Middle America, the custom spread very anciently to its farthest native limits without being able to penetrate to the Eskimo. As soon as the Spaniards appeared on the scene, the custom started on a fresh career of travel and rolled rapidly eastward about the globe until it reëntered America in the hitherto non-smoking region of Alaska.

A second invasion of America by a non-American form of pipe occurred in the eastern United States. The old pipe of this region, as already stated, had its bowl set well back from the end of the stem. The whole object thus had nearly the shape of an inverted capital T, whereas the European pipe might be compared to an L laid on its back. After the English settlers had become established on the Atlantic coast, a tomahawk pipe was introduced by them for trade purposes. This was a metal hatchet with the butt of the blade hollowed out into a bowl which connected with a bore running through the handle. One end of the blade served to chop, the other to smoke. The hatchet handle was also the pipe stem. The combination implement could be used as a weapon in war and as a symbol of peace in council. This doubleness of purpose caused it to appeal to the Indian. The heads of these iron tomahawk pipes were made in England for the Indian trade. They became so popular that those natives who were out of reach of established traders, or who were too poor to buy the metal hatchet-pipes, began to imitate them in the stone which their forefathers had used. In the Missouri valley, a generation ago, among tribes like the Sioux and the Blackfeet, imitation tomahawk pipes, which would never have withstood usage as hatchets, were being made of red catlinite together with the standard, native, inverted-T pipes. One of the two coexisting forms represented a form indigenous to the region since a thousand years or more, the other an innovation developed in Europe as the result of the discovery of America and then reintroduced among the aborigines. Diffusion sometimes follows unexpectedly winding routes.