The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 01 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 01 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
The sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a man and the
weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion that the
blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in his body. For
a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off German New Guinea,
are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with which their
wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if these rags fell into
the hands of an enemy he might injure them magically thereby. Once
when a man with a wound in his mouth, which bled constantly, came to
the missionaries to be treated, his faithful wife took great pains to
collect all the blood and cast it into the sea.[749] Strained and
unnatural as this idea may seem to us, it is perhaps less so than the
belief that magic sympathy is maintained between a person and his
clothes, so that whatever is done to the clothes will be felt by the
man himself, even though he may be far away at the time. That is why
these same Papuans of Tumleo search most anxiously for the smallest
scrap which they may have lost of their scanty garments,[750] and
why other Papuans, travelling through the thick forest, will stop and
carefully scrape from a bough any clot of red pomade which {p206} may
have adhered to it from their greasy heads.[751] In the Wotjobaluk
tribe of Victoria a wizard would sometimes get hold of a man’s opossum
rug and tie it up with some small spindle-shaped pieces of casuarina
wood, on which he had made certain marks, such as likenesses of his
victim and of a poisonous snake. This bundle he would then roast slowly
in the fire, and as he did so the man who had owned the opossum rug
would fall sick. Should the patient suspect what was happening, he
would send to the wizard and beg him to let him have the rug back.
If the wizard consented, “he would give the thing back, telling the
sick man’s friends to put it in water, so as to wash the fire out.” In
such cases, we are told, the sick man would feel cooled and would most
likely recover.[752] In Tanna, one of the New Hebrides, a man who had
a grudge at another and desired his death would try to get possession
of a cloth which had touched the sweat of his enemy’s body. If he
succeeded, he rubbed the cloth carefully over with the leaves and twigs
of a certain tree, rolled and bound cloth, twigs, and leaves into a
long sausage-shaped bundle, and burned it slowly in the fire. As the
bundle was consumed, the victim fell ill, and when it was reduced to
ashes, he died.[753] In this last form of enchantment, however, the
magical sympathy may be supposed to exist not so much between the man
and the cloth as between the man and the sweat which issued from his
body. But in other cases of the same sort it seems that the garment
by itself is enough to give the sorcerer a hold upon his victim. The
witch in Theocritus, while she melted an image or lump of wax in order
that her faithless lover might melt with love of her, did not forget to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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