Dr. O. L. Möller, Medical Director-General of the Danish army, describes a certain wise woman near Lögstör, who used in her prescriptions for the sick people who consulted her a charm of willow twigs tied together amongst other mystic things, and whose therapeutics were of a bloodthirsty character, as she would advise her patients to strike the first person they met after returning home, until they drew blood, for that person would be the cause of the disease.[40]
The fact that ghosts and demons are everywhere believed to cause diseases, and that sorcery is practised more or less by most of the races of man in connection with the causation or cure of disease, has been used as a factor in the argument for the origin of primitive man from a single pair in accordance with the orthodox belief. Dr. Pickering, the ethnologist, says: “Superstitions also appear to be subject to the same laws of progression with communicated knowledge, and the belief in ghosts, evil spirits, and sorcery, current among the ruder East Indian tribes, in Madagascar, and in a great part of Africa, seems to indicate that such ideas may have elsewhere preceded a regular form of mythology.”[41]
There has long been practised in the West Indies a species of witchcraft called Obeah or Obi, supposed to have been introduced from Africa, and which is in reality an ingenious system of poisoning. Mr. Bowrey, Government chemist in Jamaica, connects Obeah-poisoning with a plant which grows abundantly in Jamaica and other West Indian islands, called the “savannah flower,” or “yellow-flowered nightshade” (Urechites suberecta).[42]
Mr. Bowrey concludes that there is some truth in the stories told of the poisoning by Obeah-men, and that minute doses, frequently administered, might cause death without suspicion being aroused. The British Medical Journal, June 18th, 1892, has the following interesting notes on Obeah (p. 1296):—
“It is difficult to obtain detailed information regarding Obeah practices. They rest largely on the credence given to superstitious practices and vulgar quackery by the uneducated in every country, but there seems little doubt that among them secret poisoning is included. Benjamin Moseley (Medical Tracts, London, 1800) states that Obi had its origin, like many customs among the Africans, from the ancient Egyptians, Ob meaning a demon or magic. Villiers-Stuart (Jamaica Revisited, 1891) says that Obeah in the West African dialects signifies serpent, and that the Obeah-men in Jamaica carry (but in greatest secrecy, for fear of the penal laws) a stick on which is carved a serpent, the emblem being a relic of the serpent worship once universal among mankind, and also that they sacrifice cocks at their religious rites. Moseley gives the following account: ‘Obi, for the purposes of bewitching people or consuming them by lingering illness, is made of grave-dirt, hair, teeth of sharks and other animals, blood, feathers,’ and so on. Mixtures of these are placed in various ways near the person to be bewitched. ‘The victims to this nefarious art in the West Indies among the negroes are numerous. No humanity of the master nor skill in medicine can relieve the poor negro labouring under the influence of Obi. He will surely die, and of a disease that answers no description in nosology. This, when I first went to the colonies, perplexed me. Laws have been made in the West Indies to punish the Obian practice with death, but they have been impotent and nugatory. Laws constructed in the West Indies can never suppress the effect of ideas, the origin of which is in the centre of Africa.’ ‘A negro Obi-man will administer a baleful dose from poisonous herbs, and calculate its mortal effects to an hour, day, week, month, or year.’ The missionaries Waddell (Twenty-nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa, 1863) and Blyth (Reminiscences of Missionary Life, 1851) confirm this account. They are all agreed that similar practices prevail in West and Central Africa, and that Jamaican Obeah-men use poisons. Mr. Bowrey informs me that he has examined many Obeah charms, and confirms Moseley’s account of them. He thinks, however, that among the negroes the knowledge of poisons has been rapidly dying out, ‘doctor’s medicine’ and the much-advertised patent medicines having largely replaced the drugs of the native practitioners. The belief in Obeah is still, however, almost universal among the black population. According to Sir Spencer St. John (Hayti, or the Black Republic, second edition, London, 1889) secret poisoning is a lucrative occupation in the neighbouring island of Hayti, certain of the people having an intimate knowledge of indigenous poisonous plants and being expert poisoners.”
III. Offence to the Dead as a Cause of Disease.
How comes it that all the races of man of which we have any accurate information have some belief or other in spirits good or bad, and of some other life than the actual one which they live in their waking hours? The theologian answers it in his own way, the anthropologist in his, and perhaps a simpler one. With the religious aspect of the question we are not here concerned, we have merely to consider the scientific points involved. When the most ignorant savage of the lowest type falls asleep, he is as sure to dream as his more favoured civilized brother. To his companions he appears as though he were dead, he is motionless and apparently unconscious. He awakes and is himself again. What has his spirit or thinking part been doing while his body slept? The man has seen various things and places, has even conversed with friend or foe in his slumbers, has engaged in fights, has taken a journey, has had adventures, and yet his body has not stirred. Naturally enough the explanation most satisfactory is, that his soul has temporarily left his body, and has met other souls in a similar condition. He has seen and conversed with his dead friends or relatives, has been comforted by their presence or alarmed at the visitation. Here, then, we have the anthropologist’s “theory of souls where life, mind, breath, shadow, reflexion, dream, vision, come together and account for one another in some such vague, confused way as satisfies the untaught reasoner.”[43]
But the savage goes further than this: he has seen his horse, his dog, his canoe, and his spear in his dream, they too must have souls; and thus he invests with a spiritual essence every material object by which he is surrounded. And so we find funeral sacrifices and ceremonies all over the world which testify to this universal belief of primitive man. The ornaments and weapons which are found with the bones of chiefs, the warrior’s horses slain at his burial place, the food and drink and piece of money left with the dead, are intelligible on this theory, and on no other. The savage’s idea of a demon or evil spirit is usually that of a soul of a malevolent dead man. The man was his enemy during life, he remains his enemy after death; or he owed some acknowledgment and reward to a spirit who had helped him, he has neglected to pay his debt, and he has offended the spirit in consequence. In cases of fainting, delirium from fever, hysteria, epilepsy, or insanity, the savage sees the partial absence of the patient’s soul from his body, or the work of a tormenting demon. Demoniacal possession and the ceremonies of exorcism are theories readily explainable by facts with which the anthropologist is familiar. “The sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead man has got into him, and is gnawing his liver; in a Patagonian skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming, to drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever.”[44]
When Prof. Bartram, the anthropologist, was in Burma, his servant was seized with an apopleptic fit. The man’s wife, of course, attributed the misfortune to an angry demon, so she set out for him little heaps of rice, and was heard praying, “Oh, ride him not! Ah, let him go! Grip him not so hard! Thou shalt have rice! Ah, how good that tastes!”
The exorcist may so delude himself that he may believe that he has power to make the demon converse with him. There may be a falsetto voice like that of the mediums of modern civilization issuing from the patient’s mouth, and the exorcist’s questions and commands may be answered, and the evil spirit may consent to leave the sufferer in peace. In nervous or mental disorders, in cases of defective power of assimilating food, such a process may exert a soothing and highly beneficial influence on the patient who is actively co-operating by his faith in his own cure, and so the error both as to the cause of the malady and its treatment is perpetuated.