The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions

by Carveth Read

With herbs, again, whilst the utility of some, such as quinine or senna, was a matter of experience, others were equally prized out of pure fancy. Dracunculus, a plant spotted with various colours, like a viper’s skin, was supposed to be a remedy for all kinds of snake-stings.[562] The Cherokees gave their children a concoction of burs to strengthen their memories; for as a bur will stick to anything, the mind of a man with bur inside him will cling to all kinds of useful information. The same Amerinds had other remedies which illustrate the character of magical physic. They concocted a vermifuge of the red fleshy stalks of chickweed, which somewhat resemble worms, and therefore must have some influence upon them; and they steeped in this concoction a flint arrow-head, that its sharpness, communicated to the brew, might cut the worms in pieces. Biliousness, marked by the vomiting of yellow bile, was cured by four herbs—all yellow in root, or stalk, or flower. To ward off smallpox they ate the flesh of the buzzard: that bird being, in their opinion, exempt from smallpox, because its foul stench keeps the disease-spirit at a distance. To cure snake-bite, they said, rub the place in the direction contrary to that in which the snake coils itself (to the right); because this is the same as uncoiling it.[563] But here there seems to be some hiatus in the thought, for how does uncoiling the snake counteract its poison? One easily appreciates the exultation of the wizard to whom this idea first revealed itself, and his contempt for the dull process of working it out, when its place in the harmony of things was self-evident.

In some of these cases we find the assumption (tacit with primitive practitioners, but explicit in Mediæval Medicine) that “like causes like”: the adhesiveness of the bur is communicated to the memory, the sharpness of the flint arrow-point to the vermifuge, the buzzard’s immunity from smallpox to the eater of the buzzard. And this is intelligible: because, first, there are many examples (superficially considered) of like causing like, such as animal generation, the spread of fire; hot things heat, and cold things cool, and so forth: and, secondly, qualities such as stickiness and sharpness, are thought of by savages as fine material, like curses and ghosts, which may be transferred from one thing to another. But in other cases it is assumed that “like cures like,” as chickweed cures worms, and yellow herbs biliousness (as in Europe turmeric was long believed to cure jaundice); and this is a very different matter—equivalent to “like expels or annuls like.” In ordinary experience, there seem to be no obvious examples of it: but in primitive medical practice it is found that fomentation reduces inflammation, rubbing with snow is good for frost-bite, an emetic cures sickness, and castor oil diarrhœa; and such may be the experiential ground of these magico-medical fancies.

The power of herbs may depend upon rites observed at their gathering: when a Cherokee wizard pulled up a plant for medicine, he dropped a bead into the hole to compensate the earth for the theft;[564] and when a Greek physician gathered the Panaces Asclepion, which was a remedy for all diseases, he filled the hole with various kinds of grain by way of expiation.[565] In employing medicinal herbs it is also important to remember when they should be procured, as on the eve of the summer solstice, at the new or the full moon, or at the turn of the tide; by whom—a child or a virgin; and where—on a mountain-top or at a grave. Hierabotane was so potent that whoever rubbed himself with it obtained whatever he desired; and in gathering it, you first offered honey to the earth in expiation, then traced a circle around it with iron, and—taking care that neither sun nor moon should shine upon it—at the rising of the Dog Star, you pulled it up with the left hand, and dried separately in the shade the root, the stem and the leaves.[566] Indeed the conditions under which a drug can be legitimately obtained so as to ensure its efficacy, may be so numerous, minute and exigent as to make the satisfying of them almost impossible; so we need not wonder if the remedy sometimes fails. Prescriptions often include the flesh or juices of dead bodies, or their pounded bones, or other foul and repulsive ingredients related to Black Magic—much trusted, and still traditional in some strata of this country, where the belief is inexpugnable that medicine, the nastier it is, is the more efficacious.

If any one wonders how such prescriptions can have held their ground for ages, it was because patients did not always die. Recovery was credited to the drastic medicine, and death to evil Magic; and the vis medicatrix naturæ, that staunch ally of honest physic, was sometimes too strong for the wizard’s whole pharmacopœia.

(b) Again, the wizard is a surgeon, and knows something of the construction and working of the human body, and this is the beginning of Anatomy and Physiology. He was especially well informed in these matters in such a country as Fiji, where he had access to two great sources of anatomical knowledge—frequent wars and cannibalism. He also knows certain ways of treating wounds and other lesions, such as bandages, ligatures, splints, slings, massage and fomentations, which all admit of rational development and have been continuously practised to this day. Could he be content to abide by the facts, all might be well; but he is tempted to extend his methods in various directions to cases which, on very slight grounds, he believes to be similar. The best known example of the erroneous extension by analogy of a sound method is the sucking-cure. It is, or has been, practised all over the world, and obviously rests on the proved utility of suction in extracting from the flesh thorns or poisons. In Australia snake-bite is sometimes cured by sucking the wound and rinsing the mouth with water.[567] But the operation is gradually applied to other cases until, whatever pain you suffer, it is attributed to something like poison, or a thorn (or, later, a spirit), that has got inside you, though by an invisible wound, and may be sucked out. The wizard, accordingly, undertakes to suck it out, and he sometimes exhibits it to you—a piece of wood or bone, which he brought to your bedside in his waistband. Sometimes a medicine-man enjoys great suctorial powers by having a lizard in his own body.[568]

For getting a foreign body out of a man a method alternative to suction is pressure. Mr. Howitt[569] reports a remarkable prescription for curing headache. Cut out of the ground a circular turf, place the sufferer’s head in the hole and the turf upon his head; then sit or stand upon it. He may presently declare that he feels relief; but perhaps he only desires it. It is a fact that a patient sometimes feels better after such treatment, though the cause of his pain was nothing that could possibly yield to suction or pressure: that is to say, his mind yields to suggestion. But not all savages are equally suggestible, any more than we are. Dr. Coddrington says[570] that, in Pentecost Island, witches profess to cure pain with a leaf-poultice, and in taking it off to remove with it the cause of pain, perhaps a snake or a lizard. “But,” said a native, “no one sees the things but the woman, and the pain remains”—one of those troublesome sceptics! Yet it is possible that had he just undergone the operation, he would not have denied that the pain was better. There is a state of mind between suggestibility and sane judgment, namely, assentation: unwillingness or unreadiness to form or state one’s own opinion, and, consequently, an appearance of acquiescing in another’s assertion. There is confusion and conflict, from which assent is the easiest relief. This state of mind for the immediate purpose of medicine-man or orator may serve as well as suggestibility; but may soon pass off when the patient recovers his faculties, and should be distinguished from the suggestibility that takes a relatively permanent impression from the pretensions of a mountebank. The power of suggestion, however, is one of the facts that the wizard has observed, and he counts upon its aid. He has also learnt to practise hypnotism; and seeing how mysterious these things have been to the most enlightened moderns, we need not wonder that he employs them in magical therapeutics—dancing, drumming, shouting to overpower his patient and to incite himself to put forth his utmost energy. Nowhere, probably, in the whole range of his art, is the difference between Reality and Magic so obscure to himself.

The wizard, then, acquired in his medical functions (and in others) a certain empirical knowledge of some obscure facts in Psychology, and this knowledge persisted in his profession in shady quarters to our own time; but with the growth of positive Science, its mysteriousness was mistaken for quackery, until quite recently, when the facts forced themselves on the attention of some men, who needed great courage to confess their conviction. A crude Physiological Psychology, too, resulted from savage observation of a connexion between the agitations of body and mind. Very early sundry mental powers—skill, courage, affection—are located in special parts of the body—the heart, spleen, kidneys, bowels—as they still are in popular language. Apart from the bare observation that the bowels and heart are disturbed during emotion (which is true and important), these doctrines are not Science; nor are they exactly Magic, but belong to the region of ideas ancillary to Magic—ideas of qualities as material things. The savage, always eager to apply his supposed knowledge to practice, utilises his Physiological Psychology for the improvement of his mind, and misses no opportunity to make a meal upon an enemy’s (or perhaps a relative’s) heart or spleen or kidney or tongue or eye, in order to appropriate the quality for which the deceased had been conspicuous.

(c) Savages (as we have seen in the chapter on Omens) are familiar with a great many natural signs by which to judge of things not now present, but that have happened, or are about to happen. Every hunter must have a great stock of such knowledge, inasmuch as the pursuit of game entirely depends upon it. This knowledge of natural signs is, on the one hand, a genuine contribution to Natural History; it increases, is handed down from generation to generation, and forms the nucleus of Botany and Zoology. But, on the other hand, there is reared upon it, under the influence of hope and fear, the belief in Omens that give warning of good or ill success in all the affairs of life. Omens, at first merely signs mysteriously connected with events, are later regarded as the sendings of spirits or gods, whose oracles forecast the fate of heroes and nations. At first, perhaps, the wizard may do no more than other tribesmen to promote this particular superstition; but it is he who works out the great art of Divination, without which Omens would have been a matter of much less consequence.

The most famous branch of Divination, namely, Astrology, was the invention of a comparatively late age, and it was, of course, long preceded by the discovery of the rudiments of Astronomy as part of the common sense of agriculture: some knowledge of the regularity of the motions of the sun and moon and of the constancy of the stars in contrast with the planets. This is plainly presupposed by the comprehensive system of predictions based on sympathetic Magic, arbitrary assumptions and fanciful analogies which, for the last four or five thousand years, has promised to disclose to any mother the career of her infant, or to any monarch the future of his kingdom. But what now seems fanciful or arbitrary once seemed reasonable. The sun manifestly rules all things; the waxing and waning of the moon must strengthen and weaken all things; the signs of the Zodiac are certainly connected with the seasons; the planets partake of the nature of the gods.[571] If there are gods they must, as the Stoics argued, have some way of communicating with men; and what way can be more congruous with their nature than by writing on the face of the heavens? But generally the ideas of Astrology were magical rather than animistic. Having determined the powers and dispositions of the heavenly bodies, let us consider only what must necessarily follow from their influences in conjunction or opposition and various relations in trine, quartile and sextile. Thus they dreamed and speculated, but at the same time made many exact observations on the sky. And so Astronomy made some progress in spite of Magic.

(d) More widely prevalent than Astrology and far more ancient is the art of controlling the weather, especially rain; for rain, from its uncertainty in many countries and its indispensableness, is a matter of deeper interest and anxiety than even the sun himself. “Rain-making,” as it is called, common in Australia and other regions of lowly culture, survives when society has risen to higher levels, becomes the function of the most eminent wizards or priests, sometimes the duty of kings, and is not extinct amongst ourselves. But from what knowledge of fact or common sense can “rain-making” be derived? I conjecture it was from facts observed in the behaviour of fire.