Thus according to Mr. Keysser, who has no theory to maintain and merely gives us in this passage the result of long personal observation, the Kai savages are thinking, reasoning men, whose conduct, however strange and at first sight unintelligible it may appear to us, is really based on a definite religious or if you please superstitious view of the world. It is true that their theory as well as their practice differs widely from ours; but it would be false and unjust to deny that they have a theory and that on the whole their practice squares with it. Similar testimony is borne to other savage races by men who have lived long among them and observed them closely;[435] and on the strength of such testimony I think we may lay it down as a well-established truth that savages in general, so far as they are known to us, have certain more or less definite theories, whether we call them religious or philosophical, by which they regulate their conduct, and judged by which their acts, however absurd they may seem to the civilised man, are really both rational and intelligible. Hence it is, in my opinion, a profound mistake hastily to conclude that because the behaviour of the savage does not agree with our notions of what is reasonable, natural, and proper, it must therefore necessarily be illogical, the result of blind impulse rather than of deliberate thought and calculation. No doubt the savage like the civilised man does often act purely on impulse; his passions overmaster his reason, and sweep it away before them. He is probably indeed much more impulsive, much more liable to be whirled about by gusts of emotion than we are; yet it would be unfair to judge his life as a whole by these occasional outbursts rather than by its general tenour, which to those who know him from long observation reveals a groundwork of logic and reason resembling our own in its operations, though differing from ours in the premises from which it sets out. I think it desirable to emphasise the rational basis of savage life because it has been the fashion of late years with some writers to question or rather deny it. According to them, if I understand them aright, the savage acts first and invents his reasons, generally very absurd reasons, for so doing afterwards. Significantly enough, the writers who argue in favour of the essential irrationality of savage conduct have none of them, I believe, any personal acquaintance with savages. Their conclusions are based not on observation but on purely theoretical deductions, a most precarious foundation on which to erect a science of man or indeed of anything. As such, they cannot be weighed in the balance against the positive testimony of many witnesses who have lived for years with the savage and affirm emphatically the logical basis which underlies and explains his seeming vagaries. At all events I for one have no hesitation in accepting the evidence of such men to matters of fact with which they are acquainted, and I unhesitatingly reject all theories which directly contradict that evidence. If there ever has been any race of men who invariably acted first and thought afterwards, I can only say that in the course of my reading and observation I have never met with any trace of them, and I am apt to suppose that, if they ever existed anywhere but in the imagination of bookish dreamers, their career must have been an exceedingly short one, since in the struggle for existence they would surely succumb to adversaries who tempered and directed the blind fury of combat with at least a modicum of reason and sense. The myth of the illogical or prelogical savage may safely be relegated to that museum of learned absurdities and abortions which speculative anthropology is constantly enriching with fresh specimens of misapplied ingenuity and wasted industry. But enough of these fantasies. Let us return to facts.
The Kai theory of the soul.
The life of the Kai people, according to Mr. Keysser, is dominated by their conception of the soul. That conception differs greatly from and is very much more extensive than ours. The Kai regards his reflection and his shadow as his soul or parts of it; hence you should not tread on a man's shadow for fear of injuring his soul. The soul likewise dwells in his heart, for he feels it beating. Hence if you give a native a friendly poke in the ribs, he protests, saying, "Don't poke me so; you might drive my soul out of my body, and then I should die." The soul moreover resides in the eye, where you may see it twinkling; when it departs, the eye grows dim and vacant. Moreover, the soul is in the foot as much as in the head; it lurks even in the spittle and the other bodily excretions. The soul in fact pervades the body just as warmth does; everything that a man touches he infects, so to say, with his soul; that mysterious entity exists in the very sound of his voice. The sorcerer catches a man's soul by his magic, shuts it up tight, and destroys it. Then the man dies. He dies because the sorcerer has killed his soul. Yet the Kai believes, whether consistently or not, that the soul of the dead man continues to live. He talks to it, he makes offerings to it, he seeks to win its favour in order that he may have luck in the chase; he fears its ill-will and anger; he gives it food to eat, liquor to drink, tobacco to smoke, and betel to chew. What could a reasonable ghost ask for more?[436]
Two kinds of human souls.
Thus, according to Mr. Keysser, whose exposition I am simply reproducing, the Kai believes not in one nor yet in many souls belonging to each individual; he implicitly assumes that there are two different kinds of souls. One of these is the soul which survives the body at death; in all respects it resembles the man himself as he lived on earth, except that it has no body. It is not indeed absolutely incorporeal, but it is greatly shrunken and attenuated by death. That is why the souls of the dead are so angry with the living; they repine at their own degraded condition; they envy the full-blooded life which the living enjoy and which the dead have lost. The second kind of soul is distinguished by Mr. Keysser from the former as a spiritual essence or soul-stuff, which pervades the body as sap pervades the tree, and which diffuses itself like corporeal warmth over everything with which the body is brought into contact.[437] In these lectures we are concerned chiefly with the former kind of soul, which is believed to survive the death of the body, and which answers much more nearly than the second to the popular European conception of the soul. Accordingly in what follows we shall confine our attention mainly to it.
Death thought by the Kai to be commonly caused by sorcery.
Like many other savages, the Kai do not believe in the possibility of a natural death; they think that everybody dies through the maleficent arts of sorcerers or ghosts. Even in the case of old people, we are told, they assume the cause of death to be sorcery, and to sorcery all misfortunes are ascribed. If a man falls on the path and wounds himself to death, as often happens, on the jagged stump of a bamboo, the natives conclude that he was bewitched. The way in which the sorcerer brought about the catastrophe was this. He obtained some object which was infected with the soul-stuff or spiritual essence of his victim; he stuck a pile in the ground, he spread the soul-stuff on the pile; then he pretended to wound himself on the pile and to groan with pain. Anybody can see for himself that by a natural and necessary concatenation of causes this compelled the poor fellow to stumble over that jagged bamboo stump and to perish miserably. Again, take the case of a hunter in the forest who is charged and ripped up by a wild boar. On a superficial view of the circumstances it might perhaps occur to you that the cause of death was the boar. But you would assuredly be mistaken. The real cause of death was again a sorcerer, who pounded up the soul-stuff of his victim with a boar's tooth. Again, suppose that a man is bitten by a serpent and dies. A shallow rationalist might say that the man died of the bite; but the Kai knows better. He is aware that what really killed him was the sorcerer who took a pinch of his victim's soul and bunged it up tight in a tube along with the sting of a snake. Similarly, if a woman dies in childbed, or if a man hangs himself, the cause of death is still a sorcerer operating with the appropriate means and gestures. Thus to make a man hang himself all that the sorcerer has to do is to get a scrap of his victim's soul—and the smallest scrap is quite enough for his purpose, it may be a mere shred or speck of soul adhering to a hair of the man's head, to a drop of his sweat, or to a crumb of his food,—I say that the sorcerer need only obtain a tiny little bit of his victim's soul, clap it in a tube, set the tube dangling at the end of a string, and go through a pantomime of gurgling, goggling and so forth, like a man in the last stage of strangulation, and his victim is thereby physically compelled to put his neck in the noose and hang himself in good earnest.[438]
Danger incurred by the sorcerer.
Where these views of sorcery prevail, it is no wonder that the sorcerer is an unpopular character. He naturally therefore shrinks from publicity and hides his somewhat lurid light under a bushel. Not to put too fine a point on it, he carries his life in his hand and may be knocked on the head at any moment without the tedious formality of a trial. Once his professional reputation is established, all the deaths in the neighbourhood may be set down at his door. If he gets wind of a plot to assassinate him, he may stave off his doom for a while by soothing the angry passions of his enemies with presents, but sooner or later his fate is sealed.[439]