Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

So great in general is the dread of such ordeals, that they often actually serve as the most potent instruments for the discovery of crimes. In the kingdom of Loango was kept a fetich in a large basket before which all cases of theft and murder were tried; and when any great man died, a whole town would be compelled to offer themselves for trial for his murder by kissing and embracing the image, in the fear of falling down dead if they fancied themselves guilty. In the space of one year Andrew Battel witnessed the death of many natives in this way.

In the Tongan Islands the king would call the people together, and, after washing his hands in a wooden bowl, command everyone to touch it. From a firm belief that touching the bowl, in case of guilt, would cause instantaneous death, refusal to touch it amounted to conviction.[236]

Among the Fijians, distinguished in so many points from other savages by originality of conception, the ordeal of the scarf was the one of greatest dread, extorting confession, it is said, as effectually as a threat of the rack might have done. The chief or judge, having called for a scarf, would proceed, if the culprit did not confess at the sight of it, to wave it above his head, till he had caught the man’s soul, bereft of which the culprit would be sure ultimately to pine away and die.[237]

Among the ordeals of the Sandwich Islanders was one called the ‘shaking-water.’ The accused persons, sitting round a calabash full of water, were required in turns to hold their hands above it, that the priest, by watching the water, might detect, when it trembled, the presence of guilt. On the Society Islands the ordeal only differed slightly, the priest reading in the water the reflected image of the thief, after prayer to the gods to cause his spirit to be present. The mere report that such a measure had been resorted to often led to timely restitutions of stolen goods.[238]

In Sardinia there is, or was, a well, the waters of which were supposed to blind a person suspected of robbery or lying, if he were guilty; otherwise to strengthen and improve his sight.[239]

The above instances, remarkable for their practical efficiency no less than for their puerile ingenuity, suffice to illustrate the nature of savage judicial ordeals and the extreme variety displayed in their invention. The identity of many ordeals among different people, such as that by fire or water, is probably due to the readiness with which such tests would suggest themselves to the imagination. ‘He who, holding fire in his hand,’ said the Indian law, ‘is not burnt, or who, diving under water, is not soon forced up by it, must be held veracious in his testimony upon oath;’ and the same was the idea in China and Africa as well as in Europe. That these ordeals, like others, were originated by the class of shamans, and were traditionally preserved by them as one of the sources of their power, derives probability from their close analogy to the judicial ordeals invented and administered by the priests of early Europe. The trial by the hallowed morsel, which decided guilt by the effects of swallowing a piece of hallowed bread or cheese; the trial by the cross, when both accuser and accused were placed under a cross with their arms extended, and the wrong adjudged to him who first let his hands fall; or the trial by the two dice, when innocence was proved if the first dice taken at hazard bore the sign of the cross—though they may have been metamorphosed heathen ordeals, seem rather to have been of pure Christian invention; nor are they distinguished in any point above corresponding practices on the coast of Guinea, except in this, that they were called the judgments of God, and implied some belief in a personal spirit, who could and would control the verdict of chance to prove guilt or innocence.[240]

As in Europe after the fifteenth century the oath of canonical purgation gradually displaced the older system of ordeals, so it would seem that in savage life too the judicial oath succeeds in order of time the judicial ordeal. An oath implies a prayer, an invocation of punishment in case of perjury; and a man’s conscience is evidently more directly appealed to where his guilt is tested to some extent by his own confession, than where it is decided by something quite external to himself.

The witness in a modern English law court, invoking upon himself divine wrath if he swear falsely by the book he kisses, preserves with curious exactitude the judicial oath of savage times and lands. Our English judicial oath, in use though no longer compulsory, has withstood all attacks upon it, for the insuperable practical reason that the majority of men are more afraid of swearing falsely than of speaking falsely, and that the fewer scruples a man feels about lying, the more he is likely to feel about perjury. The notion that one is morally worse than the other is probably due to the imaginary terrors which, associated time out of mind with perjury, have given it a legal existence apart, and made it, so to speak, a kind of lying-extraordinary, a crime outside the jurisdiction of humanity.

In Samoa, as at Westminster, physical contact with a thing adds vast weight to the value of a man’s evidence. Turner relates how in turn each person suspected of a theft was obliged before the chiefs to touch a sacred drinking-cup, made of cocoa-nut, and to invoke destruction upon himself if he were the thief. The formula ran: ‘With my hand on this cup, may the god look upon me and send swift destruction if I took the thing which has been stolen.’ ‘Before this ordeal the truth was rarely concealed,’ it being firmly believed that death would ensue, were the cup touched and a lie told. Or the suspected would first place a handful of grass on the stone or other representative of the village god, and laying his hands on it, say, ‘In the presence of our chiefs now assembled, I lay my hand on the stone; if I stole the thing, may I speedily die,’ the grass being a symbolical curse of the destruction he invoked on all his family, of the grass that might grow over their dwellings. The older ordeal of fixing the guilt upon a person to whom the face of a spun cocoa-nut pointed when it rested, shows how ordeals may survive in use after the attainment of judicial oaths and contemporaneously with them.[241]