Magic and Fetishism

by Alfred C. Haddon

II. MAGICAL POWER OF NAMES AND WORDS

A Name is considered by backward folk to be part and parcel of a living being, and as magic can be performed on a person through tangible substances that have come into contact with him, so magic can be performed or influence exerted through the utterance of a person’s name. In the west of Ireland and in Torres Straits people have refused to tell me their names, though there was no objection to some one else giving me the information; the idea evidently being that by telling their own name to a stranger they were voluntarily putting themselves into the power of that stranger, who, by the knowledge of their name so imparted, could affect them in some way. Over the greater part of America was spread the belief in a personal soul, which is neither the bodily life nor yet the mental power, but a sort of spiritual body. In many tribes, writes Dr. Brinton ([7, 277]), this third soul or ‘astral body’ bore a relation to the private personal name. Among the Mayas and Nahuas, it was conferred or came into existence with the name; and for this reason the personal name was sacred and rarely uttered. The name was thus part of the individuality, and through it the soul could be injured. Professor Rhŷs has shown ([58, 566-7]) from philological evidence, that Aryan-speaking peoples ‘believed at one time not only that the name was a part of the man, but that it was that part of him which is termed the soul, the breath of life.’ The dislike of hearing their names mentioned is not confined to human beings, for, as is well known, in the British Islands the Fairies have a very strong repugnance to being so called; hence they should be termed the Wee-folk, the Good People, or by other ambiguous terms. Certain Scottish and English fishermen believe that the salmon and pig have a similar objection to being ‘named,’ but they do not mind being called respectively the ‘red-fish’ or the ‘queer fellow.’

If power can be exerted over men by the use of their names, it is only reasonable to believe that spirits and deities can be similarly influenced. Torres Straits islanders believe that a local bogey or a spirit-girl can be summoned by being mentioned by name ([29, v. 14, 86]), as the witch of Endor brought up the spirit of Samuel. Dr. Frazer ([20, i. 443-6]) gives examples to show that people have believed that gods must keep their true names secret, lest other gods or even men should be able to conjure with them; even Ra, the great Egyptian god of the sun, declared that the name given him by his father and mother ‘remained hidden in my body since my birth, that no magician might have magic power over me.’ This probably was one reason why the real name of supreme Gods was known but to a chosen few; one instance will suffice. To the Mohammedans, Allah is but an epithet in place of the Most Great Name; for, according to a Moslem belief, the secret of the latter is committed to prophets and apostles alone. Another reason is that the utterance of these secret names gives tremendous power, for ([42, 273]) those who know the Most Great Name of God can, by pronouncing it, transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead to life, and work other miracles.

According to Jewish tradition, when Lilith, Adam’s first wife, refused to yield obedience to him she uttered the Shem-hamphorash, that is, pronounced the ineffable name of Jehovah and instantly flew away. This utterance evidently gave her such power that even Jehovah could not coerce her, and the three angels, Snoi (Sennoi), Snsnoi (Sansennoi), and Smnglf (Sammangeloph), who were sent after her, were contented with a compromise, and Lilith swore by the name of the Living God that she would refrain from doing any injury to infants wherever and whenever she should find those angels, or their names, or their pictures, on parchment or paper, or on whatever else they might be drawn, ‘and for this reason,’ says a rabbinical writer, ‘we write the names of these angels on slips of paper or parchment, and bind them upon infants, that Lilith seeing them, may remember her oath; and may abstain from doing our infants any injury’ ([1, 165]). The custom is still maintained in the east of London of printing portions of Scripture and these three names on pieces of paper, which are placed on the four walls of a room where a baby is expected, where they remain eight days for a boy and twenty days for a girl.

Apart from the coercive power which is attributed to the pronouncing of names, there is an analogous belief in the utterance of words or phrases. Those Words of Power have been classed by Mr. Clodd ([11, 194]) as: (1) Creative Words; (2) Mantrams and their kin; (3) Passwords; (4) Spells or Invocations for conjuring up the spirit of the dead, or for exorcising demons, or for removing spells on the living; and (5) Cure-charms in formulæ or magic words. Mr. Clodd points out that these classes overlap and intermingle.

Even among such backward people as the Australians, certain of the medicine-men or sorcerers were bards who devoted their poetic faculties to the purposes of enchantment, such as the Bunjil-yenjin of the Kurnai, whose peculiar branch of magic was composing and singing potent love charms and the arrangement of marriages by elopement spells ([35, 356, 274]).

In few countries was the spoken word more effective than in ancient Ireland; a sorcerer, whether a druid or not, would stand on one foot, with one arm outstretched and with one eye shut, and chant an incantation in a loud voice ([37, i. 240]). The grand weapon of the Irish poets by which they enforced their demands was the satire. A poet could compose a satire that would blight crops, dry up milch-cows, and raise an ulcerous blister on the face. A story is told ([37, i. 454]) of Senchán Torpest, chief poet of Ireland, who lived in the seventh century, that once when his dinner was eaten in his absence by rats, he muttered a satire beginning, ‘Rats, though sharp their snouts, are not powerful in battle,’ which killed ten of them on the spot. Shakespeare, and other Elizabethan writers, often refer to the belief that Irish bards could rhyme rats to death. The Irish geis or geas [pronounced gesh or gass], plural geasa [gassa], was the exact equivalent of an ordinary tabu, but people sometimes put an injunction on a person in some such form as ‘I place you under heavy geasa, which no true champion will break through, to do so and so.’ In this manner, the witch-lady forces Finn to search for the ring she had dropped into the lake; and Marbhan put the arch-poet Senchán Torpest under geasa to obtain a copy of a lost story. When the request was reasonable or just the abjured person could not refuse without loss of honour and reputation and probably in early days personal harm would accrue if the geasa were disregarded. The power of the geis was so strong that when Grania put Diarmuid under geasa of danger and destruction to elope with her, he was advised by his friends against his will to agree: Oisin said, ‘You are not guilty if the bonds were laid on you,’ and Osgar said, ‘It is a pitiful man that would break his bonds’ ([25, 347, 8]).

Sympathetic magic bulks largely in the life of backward peoples, not merely in the form of actions to be performed, but also in those to be abstained from. The ‘Thou shalt not’ is more in evidence than ‘Thou shalt.’ The prohibitions of savages and barbarians are now spoken of under the general term of tabu. Some tabus are rational from our point of view, others seem to us to be utterly irrational, but this does not affect their validity in any way. So much has been written on this subject by divers writers that only one or two examples need be given here. The subject is again referred to on [p. 55].

The old Irish tale, the ‘Bruiden Dá Derga,’ tells of the destruction following the violation of tabus. Conaire, King of Ulster, was put under certain geasa by his father, such as: ‘Thou shalt not go desiul round Tara nor withershins round Bregia,’ ‘The evil beasts of Cerna must not be hunted by thee,’ ‘There shall not go before thee three Reds to the house of Red,’ and others. But on the way to Dá Derga’s Hostel ‘They went righthandwise round Tara, and lefthandwise round Bregia, and the evil beasts of Cerna were hunted by him, but he saw it not till the chase had ended.’ Then he saw three red men going before him to the house of Red, and Conaire says, ‘All my geasa have seized me to-night,’ and before the next day Conaire and all his host were destroyed in Dá Derga’s Hostel ([66, xxii.]). When Cuchulain was on his way to his last combat he met three hags, daughters of a wizard, all blind of the left eye. They were cooking a dog with poisons and spells on spits of a rowan tree. It was geis to Cuchulain to eat at a cooking-hearth, or to eat the flesh of a hound, but the women put him on his honour not to refuse the piece they offered him, so he took it, and all the strength went out of the left hand in which he took the food ([66, iii.]).