Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

The almost universal test among savages of guilt or innocence, where there is a want or conflict of evidence, is the ordeal. At first sight it would appear that such a practice presupposes a belief in a personal supernatural deity—that it is, in fact, as it was in the middle ages, a judgment of God, an appeal to His decision. If so, a theistic belief would be of wide extent, for the ordeal is common to very low strata of culture; but, in consideration of the savage belief in the personality and consciousness of natural objects or in spirits animating them, it would seem best to regard the ordeal simply as a direct appeal to the decision of such objects or spirits themselves, or through such objects to the decision of dead ancestors, a means for the discovery of truth that would naturally suggest itself to the shamanic class. For it is at the peril of his life that a shaman, or priest, asserts a title to superior power and wisdom; and as his skill is tested in every need or peril that occurs, he is naturally as often called upon to detect hidden guilt as to bring rain from the clouds, or drive sickness from the body. Driven, therefore, to his inventive resources by the demands made upon him, he thinks out a test which he may really consider just, or which, by proving fatal to the suspected, may place alike his ingenuity and the verdict beyond the reach of challenge. Such ordeals not only often elicit true confessions of guilt by the very terror they inspire, so that, according to Merolla, it sufficed for the Congo wizards to issue proclamations for a restitution of stolen property under the threat of otherwise resorting to their arts of detection, but they are valuable in themselves to the shamanic class from being easily adapted to the destruction of an enemy and offering a ready channel for the influx of wealth. A comparison of some of these tests, which decide guilt not by an appeal to the fear of falsehood, as an oath does, but by what is really an appeal to the verdict of chance, will display so strong a family resemblance, together with so many local peculiarities, as to make the origin suggested appear not improbable.

Bosman mentions the following ordeals as customary on the Gold Coast in offences of a trivial character:

1. Stroking a red-hot copper arm-ring over the tongue of the suspected person.

2. Squirting a vegetable juice into his eye.

3. Drawing a greased fowl’s feather through his tongue.

4. Making him draw cocks’ quills from a clod of earth.

Innocence was staked on the innocuousness of the two former proceedings, on the facility of the execution of the two latter. For great crimes the water ordeal was employed, a certain river being endowed with the quality of wafting innocent persons across it, how little soever they could swim, and of only drowning the guilty.[233]

Livingstone mentions the anxiety of negro women, suspected by their husbands of having bewitched them, to drink a poisonous infusion prepared by the shaman, and to submit their lives to the effect of this drink on their bodies; a judicial method strikingly similar to the test of bitter waters ordained in the Book of Numbers to decide the guilt of Jewish wives whom their husbands had reason to suspect of infidelity. The Barotse tribe, in Africa, who judge of the guilt of an accused person by the effect of medicine poured down the throat of a dog or cock, manifest more humanity in their system of detection.[234]

But perhaps the best collection of African ordeals is that given in the voyage of the Capuchin Merolla to Congo in 1682. In case of treason a shaman would present a compound of vegetable juices, serpents’ flesh, and such things to the delinquent, who would die if he were guilty, but not otherwise; it being of course open to the administrator to omit at will the poisonous ingredients. Innocence was further proved, if a man suffered nothing from a red-hot iron passed over his leg, if he felt no bad effects from chewing the root of the banana, from eating the poisoned fruit of a certain palm, from drinking water in which a torch of bitumen or a red-hot iron had been quenched, or from drawing a stone out of boiling water. The crime of theft was proved by the ignition or the non-ignition of a long thread held at either end by the shaman and the accused, on the application of a red-hot iron to the middle. Among the Bongo tribe a murder is often traced to its source, by making plastic representations so closely resembling the victim, that at a feast given with dances and songs the criminal will generally manifest a desire to leave the company.[235]