The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 1 of 2)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 1 of 2)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
Thus when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife or, if he is
unmarried, his sister, must wear a sword day and night in order that he
may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may not sleep during the
day nor go to bed before two in the morning, lest her husband or brother
should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy.(31) In Laos when an
elephant hunter is setting out for the chase he warns his wife not to cut
her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if she cut her hair the
elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip through
them.(32)
In all these cases (and similar instances might be multiplied
indefinitely) an action is performed or avoided, because its performance
is believed to entail good or bad consequences of a sort resembling the
act itself. Sometimes the magic sympathy takes effect not so much through
an act as through a supposed resemblance of qualities. Thus some Bechuanas
wear a ferret as a charm because, being very tenacious of life, it will
make them difficult to kill.(33) Others wear a certain insect, mutilated
but living, for a similar purpose.(34) Other Bechuana warriors wear the
hair of an ox among their own hair and the skin of a frog on their mantle,
because a frog is slippery and the ox from which the hair has been taken
has no horns and is therefore hard to catch; so the warrior who is
provided with these charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the
ox and the frog.(35)
Thus we see that in sympathetic magic one event is supposed to be followed
necessarily and invariably by another, without the intervention of any
spiritual or personal agency. This is, in fact, the modern conception of
physical causation; the conception, indeed, is misapplied, but it is there
none the less. Here, then, we have another mode in which primitive man
seeks to bend nature to his wishes. There is, perhaps, hardly a savage who
does not fancy himself possessed of this power of influencing the course
of nature by sympathetic magic; a man-god, on this view, is only an
individual who is believed to enjoy this common power in an unusually high
degree. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type derives his
divinity from a deity who has taken up his abode in a tabernacle of flesh,
a man-god of the latter type draws his supernatural power from a certain
physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the receptacle of a divine
spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so delicately attuned to the
harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may
send a thrill vibrating through the universal framework of things; and
conversely his divine organism is acutely sensitive to such slight changes
of environment as would leave ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the
line between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it in
theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what
follows I shall not insist on it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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