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
But the spiritual dangers I have enumerated are not the only ones which
beset the savage. Often he regards his shadow or reflection as his soul,
or at all events as a vital part of himself, and as such it is necessarily
a source of danger to him. For if it is trampled upon, struck, or stabbed,
he will feel the injury as if it were done to his person; and if it is
detached from him entirely (as he believes that it may be) he will die. In
the island of Wetar there are magicians who can make a man ill by stabbing
his shadow with a pike or hacking it with a sword.(459) After Sankara had
destroyed the Buddhists in India, it is said that he journeyed to Nepaul,
where he had some difference of opinion with the Grand Lama. To prove his
supernatural powers, he soared into the air. But as he mounted up, the
Grand Lama, perceiving his shadow swaying and wavering on the ground,
struck his knife into it and down fell Sankara and broke his neck.(460) In
the Babar Islands the demons get power over a man’s soul by holding fast
his shadow, or by striking and wounding it.(461) There are stones in
Melanesia on which, if a man’s shadow falls, the demon of the stone can
draw out his soul.(462) In Amboina and Uliase, two islands near the
equator, and where, therefore, there is little or no shadow cast at noon,
it is a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because it is supposed
that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul.(463) The Mangaians
tell of a mighty warrior, Tukaitawa, whose strength waxed and waned with
the length of his shadow. In the morning, when his shadow fell longest,
his strength was greatest; but as the shadow shortened towards noon his
strength ebbed with it, till exactly at noon it reached its lowest point;
then, as the shadow stretched out in the afternoon, his strength returned.
A certain hero discovered the secret of Tukaitawa’s strength and slew him
at noon.(464) It is possible that even in lands outside the tropics the
fact of the diminished shadow at noon may have contributed, even if it did
not give rise, to the superstitious dread with which that hour has been
viewed by various peoples, as by the Greeks, ancient and modern, and by
the Roumanians of Transylvania.(465) In this fact, too, we may perhaps
detect the reason why noon was chosen by the Greeks as the hour for
sacrificing to the shadowless dead.(466) The ancients believed that in
Arabia if a hyaena trod on a man’s shadow it deprived him of the power of
speech and motion; and that if a dog, standing on a roof in the moonlight,
cast a shadow on the ground and a hyaena trod on it, the dog would fall
down as if dragged with a rope.(467) Clearly in these cases the shadow, if
not equivalent to the soul, is at least regarded as a living part of the
man or the animal, so that injury done to the shadow is felt by the person
or animal as if it were done to his body. Whoever entered the sanctuary of
Zeus on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia was believed to lose his shadow and to
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