Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

§ VI.

BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE.

That disease is a derangement of functions interrupting their natural action, and carrying attendant pain as its indication, could not enter the head of the uncivilised: and, indeed, among ourselves a cold or a fever is commonly thought of as an entity in the body which has stolen in, and, having been caught, must be somehow expelled. With the universal primitive belief in spiritual agencies everywhere inhaled with the breath or swallowed with the food or drink, all diseases were regarded as their work, whether, as remarked above, through absence of the rightful spirit or subtle entrance of some hostile one. If these be the causes to which sicknesses are due, obviously the only cure is to get rid of them, and hence the sorcerer and the medicine-man find their services in request in casting out the demon by force, or enticing him by cajolery, or in bringing back the truant soul.

To the savage mind no other explanation of illness is possible than that it is due to the exit of one’s own spirit or to the intrusion of a stronger one, whether of revengeful man or animal. An old Dakota, whose son had sore eyes, said that nearly thirty years before, when the latter was a boy, he fastened a pin to a stick and speared a minnow with it, and it was strange that after so long a time the fish should come to seek revenge. When an Indian is attacked by any wild beast he believes that the avenging Kenaima has transferred his spirit to the animal which seizes him, and if he has even a toothache, of which more presently, then the Kenaima has insinuated himself in the shape of a worm. The tribal chief among the Brazilian natives acts as doctor, and when he visits the sick he asks what animal the patient has offended, and if no cure is effected, the convenient explanation is at hand that the right animal has not been found. At the death of Iron Arms, a noted North American Indian warrior, it was said that he died because the doctor made a mistake, thinking that a prairie-dog had entered him, when it was a mud-hen. In the weird mythology of the Finns the third daughter of the ruler of Tuonela, the underworld, sits on a rock rising from hell-river, beneath which the spirits of all diseases are shut up. As she whirls the rock round like a millstone the spirits escape and go on their torturing errand to mortals. The more abnormal and striking phases of disease manifest when a man is writhing under intense agony, as if torn and twisted by some fiendish living thing, or when in delirium he raves and starts, or when thrown down in epilepsy he struggles convulsively, or when he shivers in an ague, or when in more violent forms of madness he seems endowed with superhuman strength; the various symptoms attending hysteria; each and all support that theory of spirit-influence which survives among advanced races in referring disease to supernatural causes. For the ancient theories of a divine government under which disease is the expression of the anger of the gods, and medicine the token of their healing mercy, and the current notions that any epidemic or pestilence is a visitation of God, are identical in character, however improved in feature, with the barbaric belief illustrated above; and in the ages when belief in the devil as one walking to and fro upon the earth was rampant, he especially was regarded as bringer of both bane and antidote. “He may,” says an old writer, “inflict diseases, which is an effect he may occasion applicando activa passivis (by applying actives to passives), and by the same means he may likewise cure ... and not only may he cure diseases laid on by himself, as Wierus observes, but even natural diseases, since he knows the natural causes and the origin of even those better than the physicians can, who are not present when diseases are contracted, and who, being younger than he, must have less experience.”[71] In Lancashire folk-lore “casting out the ague” was but another name for “casting out the devil”; in the Arabic language the words for epilepsy and possession by demons are the same; and in such phrases as a man being “beside himself,” “transported,” “out of his mind,” or in the converse, as when it is said in the parable of the prodigal son, “he came to himself”; in the words “ecstasy,” which means a displacement or removal of the soul, and “catalepsy,” a seizing of the body by some external power, we have language preserving the primitive ideas of an intruding or departing spirit. Such minor actions as gaping and sneezing confirm the belief. The philosophy of the latter, as Mr. Gill remarks in his Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, is that the spirit having gone travelling about, its return to the body is naturally attended with some difficulty and excitement, occasioning a tingling and enlivening sensation all over the body. And the like explanation lies at the root of the mass of customs attendant on sneezing, and of the superstitions generated by it, which extend through the world.

Williams tells us that among the Fijians, when any one faints or dies, their spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it, and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying at full length and bawling out lustily for the return of his soul. So in China, when a child is lying dangerously ill, its mother will go outside into the garden and call its name, in the hope of bringing back the wandering spirit. But for all the ills that flesh is heir to, from hiccupping to madness, from toothache to broken limbs, the patient seldom dares to doctor himself; neither the etiquette of the ordained medicine-man nor the orthodox therapeutics favour that show of independence. The methods adopted by the faculty vary in detail, but they are ruled by a single assumption. When a Chinaman is dying, and the soul is believed to be already out of the body, a relative holds up his coat on a bamboo stick, and a Taoist priest seeks by incantations to bring back the truant soul so that it may re-enter the sick man. Among the Six Nations the Indians sought to discover the intruder by gathering a quantity of ashes and scattering them in the cabin where the sick person was lying. A similar recipe for tracking demons is given in the Talmud; but, as more nearly bearing on the Indian practice, a Polish custom mentioned by Grimm[72] may be quoted. When the white folk torment a sick man a friend walks round him carrying a sieveful of ashes on his back, and lets the ashes run out till the floor round the bed is covered with them. The next morning all the lines in the ashes are counted, and the result told to a wise woman, who prescribes accordingly.

A favourite mode of treatment is blowing upon or sucking the diseased organ, and deception is no infrequent resort when the sorcerer secretes thorns or fishbones, beetles or worms, in his mouth, and then pretends that he has extracted them. Cranz says that the Eskimo old women appear to suck from a swollen leg scraps of leather or a parcel of hair which they have previously crammed into their mouths, and in Australia the same dodge is practised, when the sorcerer makes believe that he has drawn out a piece of bone from the affected part. That toothache is due to a worm is a belief which exists throughout Europe and Asia, and from the Orkneys to New Zealand. Shakspere refers to it in Much Ado about Nothing, Act III. Scene ii.—

Don Pedro. What! sigh for the toothache?
Leonata. Where is but a humour or a worm;

and instances are current of this superstition being acted upon in rural districts, whilst in China the itinerant dentist conceals a worm in the stick which he applies to the aching tooth, and on the stick being gently tapped, the worm wriggles out to the satisfaction of the sufferer. But among barbaric races the treatment of disease is ordinarily the reverse of soothing. Here and there the virtues of some plant have been discovered by accident, and, whilst exalted into a deity in its native home, it has become, like cinchona, a priceless boon to the fever-stricken all over the world; but, speaking broadly, the medicine-man is no Melampus, winning the secret of their healing balm from herb and tree. Nor has he much faith in magic or charm compared to his faith in noise, in incantations, with their accompanying hideous grimaces and gestures, and their deafening yells with clang of instrument to drown the sufferer’s groans and chase away the demon. Not unfrequently, when the patient is kept without food so as to starve out the indwelling enemy, or when the body is pommelled and squeezed to force him out, the remedy helps the disease! An illustration or two from a great mass at command must suffice. Among the Mapuches the sorcerer adopts the canonical howls and grimaces. Making himself as horrible-looking as he can, he begins beating a drum and working himself into a frenzy until he falls to the ground with his breast working convulsively. As soon as he falls, a number of young men outside the hut, who are there to help him in frightening the disease-bringing spirit out of the patient, add their defiant yells, and dash at full speed, with lighted torches, against the hut. If this does not succeed, and the patient dies, the result is attributed to witchcraft. When a Pawnee chief had some ribs and an arm broken, the medicine-men danced round him, and raised their voices from murmurous chants to howls, accompanying the music by blows upon the wounded man’s breast to banish the bad spirit. In olden time this rough-and-tumble business of blows, to which immersion was added, was applied to lunatics in these islands. And, in fact, until some local paper narrates a current superstition, we seldom awaken to the fact how widely the theological explanation of diseases and the empirical choice of remedies still obtains, each being survivals of barbaric theory and practice.

The savage who has more faith, as a curative, in plants that grow on burial-places, and the Christian, who ascribed special healing power to turf and dew from a saint’s grave,[73] differ no whit in kind; and so ingrained was the medicinal belief in virtue inhering in fragments of the dead, that not even the satire of “Reynard the Fox,” telling how the wolf was cured of his earache, and the hare of his fever, the moment that they lay down on the grave of the martyred hen, could give quietus to the notion that grated skulls and sacramental shillings were specifics for the healing of the faithful.

This reference to like practices reminds us how belief in the action of invisible agencies has passed into the practice of confession among advanced races outside Christendom, as in Mexico and Peru. The Roman Catholic priests were not less astonished at finding this in vogue on their arrival in South America than the good Father Huc when, on reaching Tibet, he found shaven monks wearing rosaries, worshipping relics, using holy water, and a grand Lama decked in mitre, cope, and cross.[74] But, as the Italian proverb has it, the world is one country, and “we have all one human heart,” so that the confessional has the like explanation in east as in west. If the disease be the work of an offended deity or of an avenging spirit, let the wrong-doer admit his fault, and trust to him who is credited with influence with the unseen to exorcise the intruder.