Sometimes the valuable qualities of an animal or of a person may be imparted to another by the more delicate and ethereal process of fumigation. This refined mode of cultivating the moral virtues is or used to be practised by the Caffres of South Africa. Thus in former times as soon as a baby was born, some dirt was scraped from the forearm and other parts of the father's body and mixed with special medicines. The mixture was then made to smoulder and the baby was fumigated or “washed” in the smoke. This ceremony was deemed of great importance, being the established way of communicating to the child a portion of the ancestral spirit (itongo) through the physical medium of the father's dirt, to which the spirit naturally adheres. But while the dirt was endowed with this spiritual potency, the moral character of the infant depended in a large measure on the nature of the medicines with which the dirt was compounded, and accordingly much thought and skill were devoted to their selection and preparation. Foremost among the ingredients was a meteorite, burnt to a cinder and ground to powder. The effect of this powder, well mixed with the dirt, and introduced into the orifices of the child's body by means of smoke, is to close the anterior fontanelle of the baby's skull, to strengthen the bones of that important part of his person, to communicate vigour to his mind and courage to his disposition, and in general to brace and harden his whole system with the strength and hardness of the [pg 167] meteorite. Other ingredients which have a most beneficial effect are the powdered whiskers of a leopard, the claws of a lion, and the skin of a salamander. The mode of administering the medicine is as follows. You set fire to the compound, and while it smoulders, you hold the infant, wrapt up in a blanket, over the burning mass so as to compel it to inhale the smoke. To make sure of producing the desired effect, some of the powdered medicine is mixed with the baby's food.[522] In like manner by holding the smouldering feather of a vulture under a baby's nose you render the child valiant and brave like a vulture, and if you do the same with a peacock's feather, your offspring will be, like a peacock, impavid and never dismayed by thunder or other terrible noises.[523]
The savage custom of eating a god. Cicero on transubstantiation.
It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By eating the body of the god he shares in the god's attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament.[524] Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity. “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus,” says Cicero, “we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?”[525] In writing thus the Roman philosopher little foresaw that in Rome itself, and in the countries which have derived their creed from her, the belief which he here stigmatises as insane was destined to persist for thousands of years, [pg 168] as a cardinal doctrine of religion, among peoples who pride themselves on their religious enlightenment by comparison with the blind superstitions of pagan antiquity. So little can even the greatest minds of one generation foresee the devious track which the religious faith of mankind will pursue in after ages.
Chapter XIII. Killing The Divine Animal.
§ 1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard.
Hunting and pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural peoples, have been in the habit of killing and eating the beings whom they worship. The Californian Indians used solemnly to kill the great buzzard which they adored; but they believed that though they slew it annually, it always came to life again.