To understand the binding force of oaths among savages it is necessary to observe how closely connected they are with savage ideas of fetichism and their belief in witchcraft as a really active natural force. The hair or food of a man, which a savage burns to rid himself of an enemy, is no mere symbol of that enemy so much as in some sense that enemy himself. The physical act of touching the thing invoked has reference to feelings of casual connection between things, as in Samoa, where a man, to attest his veracity, would touch his eyes, to indicate a wish that blindness might strike him if he lied, or would dig a hole in the ground, to indicate a wish that he might be buried in the event of falsehood. In Kamschatka, if a thief remained undetected, the elders would summon all the ostrog together, young and old, and, forming a circle round the fire, cause certain incantations to be employed. After the incantations the sinews of the back and feet of a wild sheep were thrown into the fire with magical words, and the wish expressed that the hands and feet of the culprit might grow crooked; there being apparently a connection assumed between the action of the fire on the animal’s sinews and on the limbs of the man. And in Sweden there are still cunning men who can deprive a real thief of his eye, by cutting a human figure on the bark of a tree and driving nails and arrows into the representative feature. But perhaps the best illustration of this feeling is the practice of the Ostiaks, who offer their wives, if they suspect them of infidelity, a handful of bear’s hairs, believing that, if they touch them and are guilty, they will be bitten by a bear within the space of three days. It would seem that oaths appeal to the same idea of vicarious or representative influence, a real but invisible connection being imagined between the actual thing touched and the calamity invoked in touching it.
Instances from the oaths of other tribes will manifest the operation of the same feeling as that which makes grass a symbol of utter ruin in Samoa, or some bear’s hairs of a bear’s bite among the Ostiaks.
North Asiatic tribes have in use three kinds of oaths, the first and least solemn one being for the accused to face the sun with a knife, pretending to fight against it, and to cry aloud, ‘If I am guilty, may the sun cause sickness to rage in my body like this knife!’ The second form of oath is to cry aloud from the tops of certain mountains, invoking death, loss of children and cattle, or bad luck in hunting, in the case of guilt being real. But the most solemn oath of all is to exclaim, in drinking some of the blood of a dog, killed expressly by the elders and burnt or thrown away, ‘If I die, may I perish, decay, or burn away like this dog.’[242] Very similar is the oath in Sumatra, where, a beast having been slain, the swearer says, ‘If I break my oath, may I be slaughtered as this beast, and swallowed as this heart I now consume.’[243] The most solemn oath of the Bedouins, that of the cross-lines, is also characterised by the same belief which appears in the case of the slain beast affecting with sympathetic decay anyone guilty of perjury. If a Bedouin cannot convict a man he suspects of theft it is usual for him to take the suspected before a sheikh or kady, and there to call upon him to swear any oath he may demand. If the defendant agrees, he is led to a certain distance from the camp, ‘because the magical nature of the oath might prove pernicious to the general body of Arabs were it to take place in their vicinity.’ Then the plaintiff draws with his sekin, or crooked knife, a large circle in the sand with many cross-lines inside it, places his right foot inside it, causes the defendant to do the same, and makes him say after himself, ‘By God, and in God, and through God, I swear I did not take the thing, nor is it in my possession.’ To make the oath still more solemn, the accused often puts also in the circle an ant and a bit of camel’s skin, the one expressive of a hope that he may never be destitute of camel’s milk, the other of a hope that he may never lack the winter substance of an ant.[244]
Firm, however, as is the savage belief that the consequences of perjury are death or disease, a belief which shows itself not unfrequently in actually inferring the fact of perjury from the fact of death, escape from the obligation of an oath is not unknown among savages. On the Guinea Coast recourse was had to the common expedient of priestly absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath, imprecating death on himself if he failed in his promise, the priests were sometimes compelled to take an oath too, to the effect that they would not employ their absolving powers to release him. In Abyssinia a simpler process seems to be in vogue; for the king, on one occasion having sworn by a cross, thus addressed his servants: ‘You see the oath I have taken; I scrape it clean away from my tongue that made it.’ Thereupon he scraped his tongue and spat away his oath, thus validly releasing himself from it.[245]
It does not appear that savages refine on their motives for punishment, the sum of their political philosophy in this respect being rather to inflict penalties that accord with their ideas of retribution deserved for each case or crime, than to deter other criminals by warning examples. The statement that New Zealanders beat thieves to death, and then hung them on a cross on the top of a hill, as a warning example, conflicts with another account which says that thieves were punished by banishment.[246] But, subject to the influence of collateral circumstances, savage penal laws appear to be as fixed, regular, and well-known, as inflexibly bound by precedent, as often improved by the intelligence of individual chiefs, as penal laws are in more advanced societies. The case of an Ashantee king, who, limiting the number of lives to be sacrificed at his mother’s funeral, resisted all importunities and appeals to precedent for a greater number, is not without parallel in reforms of law. Thus we may read of one Caffre chief who abolished in his tribe the fine payable for the crime of approaching a chief’s krall with the head covered by a blanket; whilst another chief made the homicide of a man taken in adultery a capital offence, thus transferring the punishment for the crime from the individual to the tribe.[247]
In legal customs analogous to those of the savage or rather semi-civilized world, the legal institutions of civilized countries, their methods of procedure, of extorting truth, of punishing crimes, seem to have their root and explanation. For this reason the same interest attaches to the legal institutions of modern savages as attaches to the laws of the ancient Germanic tribes or to the ordinances of Menu, the interest, that is, of descent or relationship. The oath, for instance, of our law courts presupposes in the past, if not in the present, precisely the same state of thought as the oath customary in Samoa; and the same virtue inherent in touching and kissing the Bible in England, or the cross in Russia, leads the Tunguse Lapp to touch and then kiss the cannon, gun, or sword, by which he swears allegiance to the Russian crown.[248] The Highlander of olden time, kissing his dirk, to invoke death by it if he lied, is a similar instance of the survival of the primitive conception, that physical contact with a thing creates a spiritual dependence upon it. The ordeal, so lately the judicial test of witchcraft, still retains a foothold of faith among our country people, as is proved by the fact that not longer ago than 1863 an octogenarian died in consequence of having been ‘swum’ as a wizard at Little Hedingham, in Essex. And, lastly, the English law that no person could inherit an estate from anyone convicted of treason, or from a suicide, shows how naturally the savage law of collective responsibility, in reality so unjust, may survive into times of civilisation, whilst the ignominy still attached to the blood-relations of a criminal shows with what difficulty the feeling is eradicated.
VII.
EARLY WEDDING CUSTOMS.
Amid the wonderful uniformity which pervades the thoughts and customs of the world some strange reversals here and there occur, as where white is the colour significative of grief, or where to turn one’s back on a person is a sign of reverence. But perhaps few such reversals are more curious than the custom of the Garos, in India, who consider any infringement of the rule that all proposals of marriage must come from the female side as an insult to the mahári to which the lady belongs, only to be atoned for by liberal donations of beer and pigs from the man’s mahári to that of the ‘proposee.’ More curious, however, than even this is their marriage ceremony; at which, after the bride has been bathed in the nearest stream, the wedding party proceed to the house of the bridegroom, ‘who pretends to be unwilling and runs away, but is caught and subjected to a similar ablution, and then taken, in spite of the resistance and counterfeited grief and lamentations of his parents, to the bride’s house.’[249]