59. The tranmission of qualities.
Primitive man thought that the life and all qualities, mental and physical, were equally distributed over the body as part of the substance of the flesh. He thus came to think that they could be transferred from one body or substance to another in two ways: either by contact of the two bodies or substances, or by the eating or assimilation of one by the other. The transmission of qualities by contact could be indicated through simply saying the two names of the objects in contact together, and transmission by eating through saying the two names with a gesture of eating. Thus if one ate a piece of tiger’s flesh, one assimilated an equivalent amount of strength, ferocity, cruelty, yellowness, and any other qualities which might be attributed to the tiger. Warriors and youths are sometimes forbidden to eat deer’s flesh because it will make them timid, but they are encouraged to eat the flesh of tigers, bears, and other ferocious animals, because it will make them brave. The Gonds, if they wish a child to be a good dancer, cause it to eat the flesh of a kind of hawk, which hangs gracefully poised over the water, with its wings continually flapping, on the look-out for its prey. They think that by eating the flesh the limbs of the child will become supple like the wings of the bird. If a child is slow in learning to speak, they give it to eat the leaves of the pīpal tree, which rustle continually in the wind and are hence supposed to have the quality of making a noise. All qualities, objective and instrumental, were conceived of in the same manner, because in the absence of verbs or abstract terms their proper relation to the subject and object could not be stated or understood. Thus if a woman’s labour in child-birth is prolonged she is given to drink water in which the charred wood of a tree struck by lightning has been dipped. Here it is clear that the quality of swiftness is held to have been conveyed by the lightning to the wood, by the wood to the water, and by the water to the woman, so as to give her a swift delivery. By a similar train of reasoning she is given to drink the water of a swiftly-flowing stream which thus has the quality of swiftness, or water poured through a gun-barrel in which the fouling of a bullet is left. Here the quality of swiftness appertaining to the bullet is conveyed by the soiling to the barrel and thence to the water and to the woman who drinks the water. In the above cases all the transfers except that to the woman are by contact. The belief in the transfer of qualities by contact may have arisen from the sensations of the body and skin, to which heat, cold and moisture are communicated by contact. It was applied to every kind of quality. A familiar instance is the worship of the marks on rocks or stone which are held to be the footprints left by a god. Here a part of the god’s divine virtue and power has been communicated through the sole of his foot to the rock dented by the latter. Touching for the king’s evil was another familiar case, when it was thought that a fraction of the king’s divine life and virtue was communicated by contact to the person touched and cured him of his ailment. The wearing of amulets where these consist of parts of the bodies of animals is based on the same belief. When a man wears on his person the claws of a tiger in an amulet, he thinks that the claws being the tiger’s principal weapon of offence contain a concentrated part of his strength, and that the wearer of the claws will acquire some of this by contact. The Gonds carry the shoulder-bone of a tiger, or eat the powdered bone-dust, in order to acquire strength. The same train of reasoning applies to the wearing of the hair of a bear, a common amulet in India, the hair being often considered as the special seat of strength.[124] The whole practice of wearing ornaments of the precious metals and precious stones appears to have been originally due to the same motive, as shown in the article on Sunār.
Image of the god Jagannāth, a form of Vishnu
If the Gonds want a child to become fat, they put it in a pigsty or a place where asses have rolled, so that it may acquire by contact the quality of fatness belonging to the pigs or asses. If they wish to breed quarrels in an enemy’s house, they put the seeds of the amaltās or the quills of the porcupine in the thatch of the roof. The seeds in the dried pods of this tree rattle in the wind, while the fretful porcupine raises its quills when angry. Hence the seeds will impart the quality of noise to the house, so that its inmates will be noisy, while the quills of the porcupine will similarly breed strife between them. The effects produced by weapons and instruments are thought of in the same manner. We say that an arrow is shot from a bow with such force as to penetrate the body and cause a wound. The savage could not think or speak in this way, because he had no verbs and could not think of nouns in the objective case. He thought of the arrow as an animate thing having a cutting or piercing quality. When placed in a suitable position to exercise its powers, it flew, of its own volition, through the air to the target, and communicated to it by contact some of the above quality. The idea is more easily realised in the case of balls, pieces of bone or other missiles thrown by magicians. Here the person whom it is intended to injure may be miles away, so that the object could not possibly strike him merely through the force imparted to it by the thrower. But when the magician has said charms over the missile, communicating to it the power and desire to do his will, he throws it in the proper direction and savages believe that it will go of its own accord to the person against whom it is aimed and penetrate his body. To pretend to suck pieces of bone out of the body, which are supposed to have been propelled into the victim by an enemy, is one of the commonest magical methods of curing an illness. The following instances of this idea are taken from the admirable collection in The Golden Bough[125]: “(In Suffolk) if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted thorn. A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was festering, he remarked: ‘That didn’t ought to, for I greased the bush well after I pulled it out’ If a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the nail, clean it and grease it every day to prevent the wound from festering.” Here the heat and festering of the wounds are held to be qualities of the axe, thorn or nail, which have been communicated to the person or animal wounded by contact. If these qualities of the instrument are reduced by cleaning and oiling it, then that portion of them communicated to the wound, which was originally held to be a severed part of the life and qualities of the instrument, will similarly be made cool and easy. It is not probable that the people of Suffolk really believe this at present, but they retain the method of treatment arising from the belief without being able to explain it. Similarly the Hindus must have thought that the results produced by the tools of artisans working on materials, and by the plough on the earth, were communicated by these instruments volitionally through contact; and this is why they worship once or twice a year the implements of their profession as the givers of the means of subsistence. All the stories of magic swords, axes, impenetrable shields, sandals, lamps, carpets and so on originally arose from the same belief.