The following instances are culled from that treasury of folk custom and belief—The Golden Bough. In Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. It is commonly believed in Germany and Austria that leaping high in the fields will make the flax or hemp grow tall. A Bavarian sower, in sowing wheat, will sometimes wear a golden ring, in order that the corn may have a fine yellow colour ([20, i. 35, 36]).
As references are given on [pp. 41-44] to magical practices for the increase of animals, further examples need not be added here, their object being to provide plenty of food for the community. It was for the same reason that images of fish, turtle, and dugong were made by the islanders of Torres Straits and taken with them when they went fishing, with the idea that the image lured the real animal to its destruction; and men of the dugong clan who were symbolically decorated made mimetic movements with a dead dugong to constrain others to come and be caught ([29, v. 337, 182, and vi.]).
The same people used to carve small human effigies out of thin slabs of wood and coat them with beeswax, or the images were made entirely of beeswax. These figures were treated in various ways for nefarious magic, but always the first action was to call them by the names of the persons who were to be affected by them. If the magician pulled an arm or a leg off the image, the patient felt sore in the corresponding limb, and became ill, and eventually died in great pain; should the magician restore the dismembered limb, the patient would recover. If a magician pricked with the spine of a sting ray an image that had been named, the person indicated would be stung in the same place by a sting ray when he went fishing on the reef ([29, v. 324]). Analogous customs are to this day practised in Britain. The first example comes from Ross-shire ([48, 373]). The corp creagh is a body of clay rudely shaped into the image of a person whose hurt is desired. After a tolerably correct representation is obtained, it is stuck all over with pins and thorns and placed in a running stream. As the image is worn away by the action of the water the victim also wastes away with some mortal disease. The more pins that are stuck in from time to time the more excruciating agony the victim suffers. Should, however, any wayfarer discover the corp in the stream, the spell is broken and the victim duly recovers. From Argyleshire we learn ([49, 144]) that a long incantation was used as the pins were being put in the clay image, the beginning of which was something to this effect: ‘As you waste away, may —— waste away; as this wounds you, may it wound ——.’ When it was desired that the person should die a lingering death, care was taken that the pins should not touch where the heart was supposed to be; but when a speedy death was desired, the pins were stuck over the region of the heart. Actual instances of the employment of the corp chrè or corp chreadh, clay body or clay corpse (as Dr. Maclagan calls it), are given by the two authors last cited, one of which occurred about the year 1899. This practice is merely the continuance of old customs, for ‘King James in his Dæmonology, says that “the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness”; and in the eleventh century certain Jews, it was believed, made a waxen image of Bishop Eberhard, set about with tapers, bribed a clerk to baptize it, and set fire to it on the Sabbath, the which image burning away at the middle, the bishop fell grievously sick and died’ ([70, 124]).
Many magical practices and beliefs are difficult to classify as either contagious or homœopathic magic; they may even be a mixture of both. Such is the belief in the power of names or words, talismans and amulets, divination, and various practices of public and private magic. These will be dealt with under separate headings.
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]).