I am not aware whether it is deemed enough by many savage peoples to apply the remedy in this way, without also treating the patient himself. That it is considered necessary in various parts of the world to treat not only the sufferer but other members of his tribe, presumably kinsmen, is quite certain. Among the Buryats of Siberia the patient’s tribesmen take part in the ceremony of healing performed by the shaman, and share the wine, tea and sour cream which is drunk by the shaman and the patient.[432.2] The Wakuni, who inhabit a district of Unyamwezi, treat a victim of witchcraft by killing a cow and spotting with the blood his forehead, the root of his neck, his insteps and the palms of his hands; and such of his kinsmen as are present are similarly marked.[432.3] Dr. Matthews describes the mode of cure he witnessed among the Navajo Indians of New Mexico. At one stage of the ceremonies the sick woman and a companion were brought into the medicine-lodge and made to sit on the divine portraits in dry pigment which covered the floor. The medicine-man, having made a cold infusion in an earthen bowl, dipped a brush, or sprinkler, made of feathers, in the solution, sprinkled the picture, touched the figure of each divinity on the brow, mouth and chest with the brush, and then administered the contents of the bowl to both women, in two alternate draughts to each. What was left he himself drank, and handed the bowl to the bystanders, “that they might finish the dregs, and let none of the precious stuff go to waste”:[433.1] a pious economy, the like of which is prescribed to one Christian sect in England by the schedule to an Act of Parliament. In this Navajo ceremony, in addition to the lady-companion and the bystanders, who perhaps were blood-relations of the patient, the shaman himself partook of the sacred beverage. It is not at all impossible, though no stress can be laid upon the conjecture, that he also may have been of the woman’s kin. Many North American tribes attach great importance to the co-operation of kindred in the cure, and that to the exclusion of other persons. The Cherokees, for instance, do not allow a medicine-man to treat his own wife. Nay, they will not permit the husband or wife of any sick person to send for a medicine-man. The call must come from one of the sufferer’s blood-relations, among whom wife or husband could not of course be. Their spells for the treatment of rheumatism—the Crippler, as they appropriately call it—are very elaborate; and in order to success the doctor is subjected to the same taboos as the patient. Neither of them must touch a squirrel, a dog, a cat or a mountain trout. Neither of them, if married, may approach his wife for four nights. And according to another formula, the ceremony must be performed by both shaman and patient fasting.[433.2]
It is, however, unnecessary to suppose that the medicine-man must be a kinsman of the sufferer. His very office brings him for the time into sacramental relations with him, which would be quite sufficient to account for his sharing both the potion and the taboos. A curious parallel to the Navajo rite is found in a leech-book of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers dating from the tenth century. To heal a man of fever certain crosses and letters are directed to be written upon the holy paten, and the opening words of Saint John’s Gospel are to be sung over the writing. It is then to be washed off the paten with holy water into the medicine. The creed, the paternoster, fourteen psalms (including the hundred and nineteenth) and a solemn adjuration of the fever are then to be sung over it. When all this conjuring was finished, the leech and the sick man were each directed to sip thrice of the drink thus sanctified.[434.1]
The rite of healing in which the kin are required to join is found in every quarter of the globe. A common form is the slaughter of a beast or fowl, or perhaps of several, as a sacrifice, followed of course by a feast. Peoples as far apart in locality as they are in race are recorded to have practised this mode of cure. It has been witnessed alike among the Yakuts of Siberia, the Peguenches of Southern Chili, the islanders of Luçon and Mindanos in the East Indies, the heathen Dinkas of Central Africa and the Mohammedan inhabitants of Timbuctoo.[434.2] At Ballyvorney in county Cork less than two centuries ago an image of wood about two feet high, carved and painted like a woman, was kept by one of the family of the O’Herlehys; and, we are told, “when any one is sick of the small-pox they send for it, sacrifice a sheep to it, and wrap the skin about the sick person, and the family [that is, as I understand it, the family of the sick person] eat the sheep. But this idol hath now much lost its reputation, because two of the O’Herlehys died lately of the small-pox.”[435.1] An analogous rite is found in China. Ten men of ten different families of the patient’s relatives and friends (formerly, doubtless, of his kin only) become “security” for him. Each family contributes one hundred cash, which go towards the expenses of the feast, the remainder being found by the patient’s own family. The feast is spread in a temple, when the food is first presented to the idol, and the names of the “sureties” are written on a piece of paper and burned before the god. Among other ceremonies, after the feast the representative of the family carries home some of the rice, which is made into congee for the sick man to eat.[435.2]
I have mentioned, in treating of witchcraft, a Dyak practice which exhibits close connection between the house and absent members of the family. It perhaps goes further, and displays the belief that the conduct of a family at home affects an absent member. Similar customs, pointing to such a belief, are recorded of the Thugs.[435.3] And conversely, a tribesman of Lake Nyassa will eat no salt while on a journey, lest his wife misconduct herself at home.[436.1] This mysterious effect can be due to nothing less than the essential solidarity of the family. The matter is put plainly by the I li, one of the sacred books of the Chinese, in the declaration that “father and son are only one body, and so are husband and wife, and elder and younger brothers.” And for this reason, we are told, the possessions of a family are held in common[436.2]—a subject on which I have no space to enter.
In strict analogy, it may be remarked, to the human kin is the view entertained in the lower culture of the kinship of some orders of brutes. Every species is a kindred united by a bond as close as that which binds a human clan, so that sorcery may be wrought on all the members by operating on one or two specimens. Is a garden in Hesse infested with caterpillars, it suffices to go round it and crush a caterpillar at each of three corners. From the fourth corner another is taken and hung up in the chimney to dry in the smoke. As it dries up, the caterpillars in the garden will wither and die.[436.3] Possibly this mode of treatment only applies to such creatures as it would be difficult to deal with individually. The subject may be worth further inquiry: I can do no more than allude to it here in passing.
Connection as close as that of kindred could not be terminated by death. We have already considered the efforts made to renew by sacramental means the union with the dead. It remains to refer to a superstition which regards the tie as indissoluble even in the grave. Upon the lowest step of civilisation the Ainu of Yezo are very jealous of their burial-places. They hide them in the depths of the forest, or in some other spot, remote, unlikely to be discovered, and difficult to reach. Nothing angers them more than to know that a stranger has been near their tombs.[437.1] The Tanalas of Madagascar enclose the bodies of their dead in little huts erected in inaccessible parts of the forest, and the living are forbidden to intrude into the thickets where these huts are found.[437.2] The Haidahs of British Columbia used to cremate their dead, because they feared that their enemies would else get hold of the body and make charms from it.[437.3] No reason is assigned by the traveller who reports it for the Ainu feeling; none is assigned for the Tanala practice; but we have perhaps the clue to both here, as well as to the oft-sought origin of cremation among the prehistoric tribes of Europe. If the dead man be a part of the whole body of the clan in anything like a material sense, for a foe to obtain possession of any part of the corpse would be a serious danger for the survivors. The belief of the Narrinyeri of Australia was that if a sorcerer obtained a bone of the totem animal of a hostile clan he could afflict the clan with sickness.[437.4] In the Banks’ Islands burials are often secret, and care is taken to prevent the bones from being dug up for arrows and for charms.[437.5] In Equatorial Africa the Mpongwe kings are always interred secretly, for fear that other tribes should dig up the head to make a powerful fetish of the brains.[437.6] The precautions in the last two cases depend, it may be, on the intrinsic value of the relics of an able or powerful man rather than his relation to those who are in terror of the charms that may be made of his corpse. In the higher civilisation of China, however, it is quite clear that the condition of a corpse is of the greatest moment to the health and prosperity of his descendants. Wherefore small iron nails are scattered in the coffin, also hempseeds, peas and millet, and red yeast, to cause the sons and grandsons of the dead to beget numerous sons and become the ancestors of remoter progeny, and to provide them with plenty of food for all time to come. Pith and rice-paper, which will absorb the fluid products of decay, are scattered to cause the descendants to become grand and of high rank. Two pairs of trousers are spread over the corpse, stuffed with ingots of gold- and silver-paper. “These are expected to enormously enrich the dead and his offspring.” On the other hand, metal buttons are avoided on the grave-clothes, because they will injure the body while it is decaying, “and consequently cause great injuries also” to the posterity of the deceased. And while the coffin, having been made and brought to the house, is being prepared for the reception of the body, the mourners abstain from wailing, “because manifestations of woe and distress might cause real woe and distress to be enclosed in the coffin, and so bring bad luck not only on the dead, but also on his descendants, the fate of whom is most intimately bound up with the grave of their ancestor.”[438.1] More than this, necromancers profess to be able to tell the fortunes of the living by inspection of the bodies of their dead ancestors, which, if not among the Chinese themselves, at all events among certain of the wild tribes, are dug up for the purpose. And it is on record that, in the various revolutions which have from time to time convulsed the country, the imperial mausolea have been broken open “and the entombed corpses mangled and destroyed with the object of bringing ruin on the imperial descendant seated on the tottering throne.” The aboriginal Luh-N’zehtsze believe that health depends on the cleanness of the bones of departed kinsmen. Accordingly, when a man has been in the grave a year he is exhumed and his bones are carefully washed; and whenever any of his family are sick the same operation is at once performed, no matter how long or how short the time since he was buried.[439.1] Even in Europe we have the well-known superstition that the state and appearance of a corpse before burial indicate whether other deaths in the family are to follow, as if it be limp, or the eyes cannot be closed, and so forth. According to Corean opinion, the prosperity of a dead man’s descendants depends solely on the right choice of the place where he is buried. Hence the utmost care is taken in its selection, and the art of divining the proper spot is a special profession in the country.[439.2] The Maori sentiment, it may be added, which regards as one of the most frightful insults that can be flung at a man to tell him to cook his great-grandfather, seems to spring from the same root. The Maoris do not eat their relations: hence to bid a man cook his father would be a great curse. But to tell him to cook his great-grandfather would be far worse, because it would include “every individual who has sprung from him.”[439.3] In other words, a man is looked upon as one with all his descendants. The belief in an indissoluble corporal union must have preceded such an interpretation of language which in terms only mentions the ancestor.
We may now sum up the results of our inquiry into the theory of the Life-token. The length of the investigation is justified by the importance of the subject in the long and wonderful history of civilisation. I do not pretend here to give a complete account of savage philosophy. In spite of the investigations of anthropologists during the last thirty years, we are as yet far from being in a position to form a satisfactory synthesis—a synthesis which will reckon with the many-sided activity of the human mind, even in the lower stages of its development, and will estimate at its due value every influence, material as well as intellectual, which, entering in early times into the stream of culture, deflected its current or added to its volume, until it at last attained that irresistible force whose direction we know though its issue remains dark and uncertain. My own object is much humbler. And if I have succeeded in laying with any measure of clearness before the reader the sacramental conception of life underlying the incident of the Life-token, I must not be supposed to depreciate as factors in savage culture other conceptions with which I am not immediately concerned. I am quite aware, too, that much that I have put forward, in so far as I have put forward anything new, must be considered as yet only tentative and conjectural. Tradition, conservative as it is, is in its nature shifting and liable to endless combinations. It is, therefore, compounded of elements not merely various, but often contradictory. This renders the task of disentangling peculiarly difficult, needing patience that cannot be discouraged, and an insight that long familiarity with the ideas of the uncivilised will not always give.
Starting from his personal consciousness, the savage attributes the like consciousness to everything he sees or feels around him. And holding that outward form is by no means of the essence of existence or of individuality, he looks upon transformation as an ordinary incident, happening to all men at death, happening to many men and other creatures whensoever they will. From the capacity of transformation to the capacity of division the step is not a long one. To be transformed into a pomegranate or a heap of grain is to have one’s life equally diffused through a thousand seeds, each of which is endowed with the powers and possibilities of the whole. Scattered, they may re-unite; and if all but one be destroyed, from that one a new whole can be reproduced, or some other shape may be assumed wherein will reside, undiminished and unobscured, all the consciousness and all the power of the original. But what was regarded as true of one shape was regarded as true of another. It was deemed to be practicable so to sever one’s own personality as to secrete and safeguard one’s life. This severed portion we call—we have no better word—the External Soul. So long as the External Soul was unharmed the man could not be slain. And conversely, its condition would be an index of his. This perhaps is an inconsistency; but logical consistency is not always important to savages. It is evident that if the life be bound up with an object outside the man, the two will decay and die together. The Life-token, therefore, or the External Soul, must be carefully tended and watched, so as to preserve it and promote its growth and prosperity, and through it the growth and prosperity of the person to whom it belongs, and of whom it is a part. Any severed fragment of the substance of a man then assumes importance. Though severed, it is, notwithstanding, inseparably connected with him; and injury inflicted upon it would be felt by him. On the other hand, care bestowed upon it and the promotion of its well-being would redound to his advantage. Hence one of the methods of witchcraft was to injure the severed portion of his substance, and one of the methods of defence, both against witchcraft and more direct attack, was to unite the severed portion with some divinity. But the conception of life which regarded it as severable could not be confined to actual portions of the substance. Whatever was closely bound up with a man’s personality would be looked upon as part of himself. His clothing and weapons, constantly associated with him, would attract a measure of the consideration due to himself, would be deemed fragments of his identity, would be filled with his life. And as his property increased with civilisation it would all be included in the same manner, until at last his mere appointment, the exercise of that will and of that power which had been instrumental in acquiring and guarding his property, became sufficient to create any object his External Soul or Life-token.
Whether observation of the natural phenomenon of birth—the separation of a child from its mother’s body—contributed to the evolution of this train of superstition we do not know. We know, however, that, parallel with the mode of thought which thus represented the personality as divisible, and, so far as we can ascertain, on the same plane of culture with it, a kindred descended in fact or by reputation from a single mother, was held to be, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body. The kinsmen were one flesh, members one of another, by virtue of their common parent. That parent was, in the lowest stage of civilisation in which we can trace it, generally held to be a brute, a tree or some other vegetable, occasionally one of the heavenly bodies, or even a rock. No difficulty would be felt in this by a people who believed in the doctrine of Transformation. The object so regarded as parent was the name and emblem of the kin. It was sacred; and where, as it usually was, it was fit for food, it was never eaten, save on certain solemn occasions when the kinsmen met to signify and renew their union by partaking of a sacramental meal. When the object was not eatable, it was represented on these occasions by another which could be eaten. As civilisation advanced, the rites of totemism gave place to, or grew into, the worship of anthropomorphic gods, and the sacred ancestral object, or totem as it is called, sank into a symbol, or attendant, or into a special property of the god who had superseded it.
I have endeavoured to trace the conception of the kindred, or clan, as one body in a number of archaic practices. Beginning from the formal reception into the kin by the blood-covenant, which has been fully treated by Professor Robertson Smith, whose untimely death anthropological science will long deplore, and by Dr. Trumbull, we have devoted special attention to sacramental rites of burial and of marriage. Other rites and superstitions have come under notice; nor have we by any means exhausted the subject. We have found the unity of the kin a vital conception penetrating savage life to its core. In the words of Mr. Fison: “To the savage, the whole gens is the individual, and he is full of regard for it. Strike the gens anywhere, and every member of it considers himself struck, and the whole body corporate rises up in arms against the striker. The South Australian savage looks upon the universe as the Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs; and all things, animate and inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate whereof he himself is part. They are ‘almost parts of himself,’ as Mr. Stewart shrewdly remarks.”[444.1] Mr. Stewart would not have erred had he put it more strongly still; and the South Australian savages are only in a stage through which, there is reason to believe, every other people in the world has passed or is passing: so many and so widely scattered are its traces, and so deeply impressed are they upon human institutions and beliefs.