Injurious effects of adultery on the adulteress. Speaking of the same region of West Africa, an old writer tells us that “conjugal chastity is singularly respected among these people; adultery is placed in the list of the greatest crimes. By an opinion generally received, the women are persuaded that if they were to render themselves guilty of infidelity, the greatest misfortunes would overwhelm them, unless they averted them by an avowal made to their husbands, and in obtaining their pardon for the injury they might have done.”[109.1] Dangerous pollution supposed to be incurred by unchastity. The Looboos of Sumatra think that an unmarried young woman who has been got with child falls thereby into a dangerous state called looï, which is such that she spreads misfortune wherever she goes. Hence when she enters a house, the people try to drive her out by force.[109.2] Amongst the Sulka of New Britain unmarried people who have been guilty of unchastity are believed to contract thereby a fatal pollution (sle) of which they will die, if they do not confess their fault and undergo a public ceremony of purification. Such persons are avoided: no one will take anything at their hands: parents point them out to their children and warn them not to go near them. The infection which they are supposed to spread is apparently physical rather than moral in its nature; for special care is taken to keep the paraphernalia of the dance out of their way, the mere presence of persons so polluted being thought to tarnish the paint on the instruments. Men who have contracted this dangerous taint rid themselves of it by drinking sea-water mixed with shredded coco-nut and ginger, after which they are thrown into the sea. Emerging from the water they put off the dripping clothes which they wore during their state of defilement and cast them away. This purification is believed to save their lives, which otherwise must have been destroyed by their unchastity.[109.3] Among the Buduma of Lake Chad, in Central Africa, at the present day “a child born out of wedlock is looked on as a disgrace, and must be drowned. If this is not done, great misfortunes will happen to the tribe. All the men will fall sick, and the women, cows and goats will become barren.”[110.1]
Conclusion. These examples may suffice to shew that among many races sexual immorality, whether in the form of adultery, fornication, or incest, is believed of itself to entail, naturally and inevitably, without the intervention of society, most serious consequences not only on the culprits themselves, but also on the community, often indeed to menace the very existence of the whole people by destroying the food supply. I need hardly remind you that all these beliefs are entirely baseless; no such consequences flow from such acts; in short, the beliefs in question are a pure superstition. Yet we cannot doubt that wherever this superstition has existed it must have served as a powerful motive to deter men from adultery, fornication, and incest. If that is so, then I think I have proved my third proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for marriage, and has thereby contributed to the stricter observance of the rules of sexual morality both among the married and the unmarried.
V.
RESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE
Superstition as a prop to the security of human life. I pass now to my fourth and last proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for human life and has thereby contributed to the security of its enjoyment.
The fear of ghosts. The particular superstition which has had this salutary effect is the fear of ghosts, especially the ghosts of the murdered. The fear of ghosts is widespread, perhaps universal, among savages; it is hardly extinct among ourselves. If it were extinct, some learned societies might put up their shutters. Dead or alive, the fear of ghosts has certainly not been an unmixed blessing. Indeed it might with some show of reason be maintained that no belief has done so much to retard the economic and thereby the social progress of mankind as the belief in the immortality of the soul; for this belief has led race after race, generation after generation, to sacrifice the real wants of the living to the imaginary wants of the dead. The waste and destruction of life and property which this faith has entailed are enormous and incalculable. Disastrous consequences entailed by the fear of the dead. Without entering into details I will illustrate by a single example the disastrous economic, political, and moral consequences which flow from that systematic destruction of property which the fear of the dead has imposed on many races. Speaking of the Patagonians, the well-informed and intelligent traveller d’Orbigny observes: “They have no laws, no punishments inflicted on the guilty. Each lives as he pleases, and the greatest thief is the most highly esteemed, because he is the most dexterous. A motive which will always prevent them from abandoning the practice of theft, and at the same time will always present an obstacle to their ever forming fixed settlements, is the religious prejudice which, on the death of one of their number, obliges them to destroy his property. A Patagonian, who has amassed during the whole of his life an estate by thieving from the whites or exchanging the products of the chase with neighbouring tribes, has done nothing for his heirs; all his savings are destroyed with him, and his children are obliged to rebuild their fortunes afresh,—a custom which, I may observe in passing, is found also among the Tamanaques of the Orinoco, who ravage the field of the deceased and cut down the trees which he has planted;[112.1] and among the Yuracares, who abandon and shut up the house of the dead, regarding it as a profanation to gather a single fruit from the trees of his field. It is easy to see that with such customs they can nourish no real ambition since their needs are limited to themselves; it is one of the causes of their natural indolence and is a motive which, so long as it exists, will always impede the progress of their civilization. Why should they trouble themselves about the future when they have nothing to hope from it? The present is all in all in their eyes, and their only interest is individual; the son will take no care of his father’s herd, since it will never come into his possession; he busies himself only with his own affairs and soon turns his thoughts to looking after himself and getting a livelihood. This custom has certainly something to commend it from the moral point of view in so far as it destroys all the motives for that covetousness in heirs which is too often to be seen in our cities. The desire or the hope of a speedy death of their parents cannot exist, since the parents leave absolutely nothing to their children; but on the other hand, if the Patagonians had preserved hereditary properties, they would without doubt have been to-day in possession of numerous herds, and would necessarily have been more formidable to the whites, since their power in that case would have been more than doubled, whereas their present habits will infallibly leave them in a stationary state, from which nothing but a radical change will be able to deliver them.”[113.1] Thus poverty, indolence, improvidence, political weakness, and all the hardships of a nomadic life are the miserable inheritance which the fear of the dead entails on these wretched Indians. Heavy indeed is the toll which superstition exacts from all who pass within her gloomy portal.
Fear of the ghosts of the slain a check on murder. But I am not here concerned with the disastrous and deplorable consequences, the unspeakable follies and crimes and miseries, which have flowed in practice from the theory of a future life. My business at present is with the more cheerful side of the subject, with the wholesome, though groundless, terror which ghosts, apparitions, and spectres strike into the breasts of hardened ruffians and desperadoes. So far as such persons reflect at all and regulate their passions by the dictates of prudence, it seems plain that a fear of ghostly retribution, of the angry spirit of their victim, must act as a salutary restraint on their disorderly impulses; it must reinforce the dread of purely secular punishment and furnish the choleric and malicious with a fresh motive for pausing before they imbrue their hands in blood. This is so obvious, and the fear of ghosts is so notorious, that both might perhaps be taken for granted, especially at this late hour of the evening. But for the sake of completeness I will mention a few illustrative facts, taking them almost at random from distant races in order to indicate the wide diffusion of this particular superstition. I shall try to shew that while all ghosts are feared, the ghosts of slain men are especially dreaded by their slayers.
Ancient Greek belief as to the anger of a ghost at his slayer. The ancient Greeks believed that the soul of any man who had just been killed was angry with his slayer and troubled him; hence even an involuntary homicide had to depart from his country for a year until the wrath of the dead man had cooled down; nor might the slayer return until sacrifice had been offered and ceremonies of purification performed. If his victim chanced to be a foreigner, the homicide had to shun the country of the dead man as well as his own.[114.1] The legend of the matricide Orestes, how he roamed from place to place pursued and maddened by the ghost of his murdered mother, reflects faithfully the ancient Greek conception of the fate which overtakes the murderer at the hands of the ghost.[114.2]
Among the Greeks a manslayer was dreaded and shunned because he was thought to be haunted by the angry and dangerous ghost of his victim. But it is important to observe that not only does the hag-ridden homicide go in terror of his victim’s ghost; he is himself an object of fear and aversion to the whole community on account of the angry and dangerous spirit which dogs his steps. It was probably more in self-defence than out of consideration for the manslayer that Attic law compelled him to quit the country. This comes out clearly from the provisions of the law. For in the first place, on going into banishment the homicide had to follow a prescribed road:[114.3] obviously it would have been hazardous to let him stray about the country with a wrathful ghost at his heels. In the second place, if another charge was brought against a banished homicide, he was allowed to return to Attica to plead in his defence, but he might not set foot on land; he had to speak from a ship, and even the ship might not cast anchor or put out a gangway. The judges avoided all contact with the culprit, for they judged the case sitting or standing on the shore.[114.4] Plainly the intention of this rule was literally to insulate the slayer, lest by touching Attic earth even indirectly through the anchor or the gangway he should blast it by a sort of electric shock, as we might say; though doubtless the Greeks would have said that the blight was wrought by contact with the ghost, by a sort of effluence of death. For the same reason if such a man, sailing the sea, happened to be wrecked on the coast of the country where his crime had been committed, he was allowed to camp on the shore till a ship came to take him off, but he was expected to keep his feet in sea-water all the time,[115.1] evidently to neutralise the ghostly infection and prevent it from spreading to the soil. For the same reason, when the turbulent people of Cynaetha in Arcadia had perpetrated a peculiarly atrocious massacre and had sent envoys to Sparta, all the Arcadian states through which the envoys took their way ordered them out of the country; and after their departure the Mantineans purified themselves and their belongings by sacrificing victims and carrying them round the city and the whole of their land.[115.2] So when the Athenians had heard of a massacre at Argos, they caused purificatory offerings to be carried round the public assembly.[115.3]
The legend of Orestes reflects the Greek horror of a manslayer. No doubt the root of all such observances was a fear of the dangerous ghost which haunts the murderer and against which the whole community as well as the homicide himself must be on its guard. The Greek practice in these respects is clearly mirrored in the legend of Orestes; for it is said that the people of Troezen would not receive him in their houses until he had been purified of his guilt,[115.4] that is, until he had been rid of his mother’s ghost. The Akikuyu of British East Africa think that if a man who has killed another comes and sleeps at a village and eats with a family in their hut, the persons with whom he has eaten contract a dangerous pollution which might prove fatal to them were it not removed in time by a medicine-man. The very skin on which the homicide slept has absorbed the taint and might infect any one else who slept on it. So a medicine-man is sent for to purify the hut and its occupants.[115.5] Manslayers purged of the stain of human blood by being smeared with the blood of pigs. The Greek mode of purifying a homicide was to kill a sucking pig and wash the hands of the guilty man in its blood: until this ceremony had been performed the manslayer was not allowed to speak.[116.1] Among the hill-tribes near Rajamahal in Bengal, if two men quarrel and blood be shed, the one who cut the other is fined a hog or a fowl, “the blood of which is sprinkled over the wounded person, to purify him, and to prevent his being possessed by a devil.”[116.2] In this case the blood-sprinkling is avowedly intended to prevent the man from being haunted by a spirit; only it is not the aggressor but his victim who is supposed to be in danger and therefore to stand in need of purification. We have seen that among these and other savage tribes pig’s blood is sprinkled on persons and things as a mode of purifying them from the pollution of sexual crimes.[116.3] Among the Cameroon negroes in West Africa accidental homicide can be expiated by the blood of an animal. The relations of the slayer and of the slain assemble. An animal is killed, and every person present is smeared with its blood on his face and breast. They think that the guilt of manslaughter is thus atoned for, and that no punishment will overtake the homicide.[116.4] In Car Nicobar a man possessed by devils is cleansed of them by being rubbed all over with pig’s blood and beaten with leaves. The devils are supposed to be thus swept off like flies from the man’s body to the leaves, which are then folded up and tied tightly with a special kind of string. A professional exorciser administers the beating, and at every stroke with the leaves he falls down with his face on the floor and calls out in a squeaky voice, “Here is a devil.” This ceremony is performed by night; and before daybreak all the packets of leaves containing the devils are thrown into the sea.[117.1] The Greeks similarly used laurel leaves as well as pig’s blood in purificatory ceremonies.[117.2] In all such cases we may assume that the purification was originally conceived as physical rather than as moral, as a sort of detergent which washed, swept, or scraped the ghostly or demoniacal pollution from the person of the ghost-haunted or demon-possessed man. The motive for employing blood in these rites of cleansing is not clear. Perhaps the purgative virtue ascribed to it may have been based on the notion that the offended spirit accepts the blood as a substitute for the blood of the man or woman.[117.3] However, it is doubtful whether this explanation could cover all the cases in which blood is sprinkled as a mode of purification. Certainly it is odd, as the sage Heraclitus long ago remarked, that blood-stains should be thought to be removed by blood-stains, as if a man who had been bespattered with mud should think to cleanse himself by bespattering himself with more mud.[117.4] But the ways of man are wonderful and sometimes past finding out.
The matricide Orestes is said to have recovered his wits by biting off one of his own fingers. There was a curious story that after Orestes had gone mad through murdering his mother he recovered his wits by biting off one of his own fingers; the Furies of his murdered mother, which had appeared black to him before, appeared white as soon as he had mutilated himself in this way: it was as if the taste of his own blood sufficed to avert or disarm the wrathful ghost.[117.5] A hint of the way in which the blood may have been supposed to produce this result is furnished by the practice of some savages. Manslayers commonly taste their victims’ blood in order not to be haunted by their ghosts. The Indians of Guiana believe that an avenger of blood who has slain his man must go mad unless he tastes the blood of his victim; the notion apparently is that the ghost drives him crazy, just as the ghost of Clytemnestra did to Orestes, who was also, be it remembered, an avenger of blood. In order to avert this consequence the Indian manslayer resorts on the third night to the grave of his victim, pierces the corpse with a sharp-pointed stick, and withdrawing it sucks the blood of the murdered man. After that he goes home with an easy mind, satisfied that he has done his duty and that he has nothing more to fear from the ghost.[118.1] A similar custom was observed by the Maoris in battle. When a warrior had slain his foe in combat, he tasted his blood, believing that this preserved him from the avenging spirit (atua) of his victim; for they imagined that “the moment a slayer had tasted the blood of the slain, the dead man became a part of his being and placed him under the protection of the atua or guardian-spirit of the deceased.”[118.2] Thus in the opinion of these savages, by swallowing a portion of their victim they made him a part of themselves and thereby converted him from an enemy into an ally; they established, in the strictest sense of the words, a blood-covenant with him. The Aricara Indians also drank the blood of their slain foes and proclaimed the deed by the mark of a red hand on their faces.[118.3] The motive for this practice may have been, as with the Maoris, a desire to appropriate and so disarm the ghost of an enemy. In antiquity some of the Scythians used to drink the blood of the first foes they killed; and they also tasted the blood of the friends with whom they made a covenant, for “they take that to be the surest pledge of good faith.”[118.4] Homicides supposed to go mad unless they taste the blood of their victim. The motive of the two customs was probably the same. “To the present day, when a person of another tribe has been slain by a Nandi, the blood must be carefully washed off the spear or sword into a cup made of grass, and drunk by the slayer. If this is not done it is thought that the man will become frenzied.”[118.5] So among some tribes of the Lower Niger “it is customary and necessary for the executioner to lick the blood that is on the blade”; moreover “the custom of licking the blood off the blade of a sword by which a man has been killed in war is common to all these tribes, and the explanation given me by the Ibo, which is generally accepted, is, that if this was not done, the act of killing would so affect the strikers as to cause them to run amok among their own people; because the sight and smell of blood render them absolutely senseless as well as regardless of all consequences. And this licking the blood is the only sure remedy, and the only way in which they can recover themselves.”[119.1] So, too, among the Shans of Burma “it was the curious custom of executioners to taste the blood of their victims, as they believed if this were not done illness and death would follow in a short time. In remote times Shan soldiers always bit the bodies of men killed by them in battle.”[119.2] Strange as it may seem, this truly savage superstition exists apparently in Italy to this day. There is a widespread opinion in Calabria that if a murderer is to escape he must suck his victim’s blood from the reeking blade of the dagger with which he did the deed.[119.3] We can now perhaps understand why the matricide Orestes was thought to have recovered his wandering wits as soon as he had bitten off one of his fingers. By tasting his own blood, which was also that of his victim, since she was his mother, he might be supposed to form a blood-covenant with the ghost and so to convert it from a foe into a friend. Various precautions taken by manslayers against the ghosts of their victims. The Kabyles of North Africa think that if a murderer leaps seven times over his victim’s grave within three or seven days of the murder, he will be quite safe. Hence the fresh grave of a murdered man is carefully guarded.[119.4] The Lushai of North-Eastern India believe that if a man kills an enemy the ghost of his victim will haunt him and he will go mad, unless he performs a certain ceremony which will make him master of the dead man’s soul in the other world. The ceremony includes the sacrifice of an animal, whether a pig, a goat, or a mithan.[120.1] Among the Awemba of Northern Rhodesia, “according to a superstition common among Central African tribes, unless the slayers were purified from blood-guiltiness they would become mad. On the night of return no warrior might sleep in his own hut, but lay in the open nsaka in the village. The next day, after bathing in the stream and being anointed with lustral medicine by the doctor, he could return to his own hearth, and resume intercourse with his wife.”[120.2] In all such cases the madness of the slayer is probably attributed to the ghost of the slain, which has taken possession of him.