Magic and FetishismHaddon, Alfred C. (Alfred Cort)
Religion
Magic and Fetishism
Haddon, Alfred C. (Alfred Cort)
Fetishism; Magic
As references are given on pp. 41-44 to magical practices for the
increase of animals, further examples need not be added here, their
object being to provide plenty of food for the community. It was for the
same reason that images of fish, turtle, and dugong were made by the
islanders of Torres Straits and taken with them when they went fishing,
with the idea that the image lured the real animal to its destruction;
and men of the dugong clan who were symbolically decorated made mimetic
movements with a dead dugong to constrain others to come and be caught
(29, v. 337, 182, and vi.).
The same people used to carve small human effigies out of thin slabs
of wood and coat them with beeswax, or the images were made entirely
of beeswax. These figures were treated in various ways for nefarious
magic, but always the first action was to call them by the names of the
persons who were to be affected by them. If the magician pulled an arm
or a leg off the image, the patient felt sore in the corresponding limb,
and became ill, and eventually died in great pain; should the magician
restore the dismembered limb, the patient would recover. If a magician
pricked with the spine of a sting ray an image that had been named,
the person indicated would be stung in the same place by a sting ray
when he went fishing on the reef (29, v. 324). Analogous customs are to
this day practised in Britain. The first example comes from Ross-shire
(48, 373). The _corp creagh_ is a body of clay rudely shaped into the
image of a person whose hurt is desired. After a tolerably correct
representation is obtained, it is stuck all over with pins and thorns
and placed in a running stream. As the image is worn away by the action
of the water the victim also wastes away with some mortal disease. The
more pins that are stuck in from time to time the more excruciating
agony the victim suffers. Should, however, any wayfarer discover the
_corp_ in the stream, the spell is broken and the victim duly recovers.
From Argyleshire we learn (49, 144) that a long incantation was used as
the pins were being put in the clay image, the beginning of which was
something to this effect: ‘As you waste away, may —— waste away; as this
wounds you, may it wound ——.’ When it was desired that the person should
die a lingering death, care was taken that the pins should not touch
where the heart was supposed to be; but when a speedy death was desired,
the pins were stuck over the region of the heart. Actual instances of
the employment of the _corp chrè_ or _corp chreadh_, clay body or clay
corpse (as Dr. Maclagan calls it), are given by the two authors last
cited, one of which occurred about the year 1899. This practice is merely
the continuance of old customs, for ‘King James in his _Dæmonology_,
says that “the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay,
that by roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of may
be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness”; and in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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