The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 03 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 03 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
will pack them into the same basket in which their souls are already
languishing in captivity.(231)
(M51) In Hawaii there were sorcerers who caught souls of living people,
shut them up in calabashes, and gave them to people to eat. By squeezing a
captured soul in their hands they discovered the place where people had
been secretly buried.(232) Amongst the Canadian Indians, when a wizard
wished to kill a man, he sent out his familiar spirits, who brought him
the victim’s soul in the shape of a stone or the like. The wizard struck
the soul with a sword or an axe till it bled profusely, and as it bled the
man to whom it belonged fell ill and died.(233) In Amboyna if a doctor is
convinced that a patient’s soul has been carried away by a demon beyond
recovery, he seeks to supply its place with a soul abstracted from another
man. For this purpose he goes by night to a house and asks, “Who’s there?”
If an inmate is incautious enough to answer, the doctor takes up from
before the door a clod of earth, into which the soul of the person who
replied is thought to have passed. This clod the doctor lays under the
sick man’s pillow, and performs certain ceremonies by which the stolen
soul is conveyed into the patient’s body. Then as he goes home the doctor
fires two shots to frighten the soul from returning to its proper
owner.(234) A Karen wizard will catch the wandering soul of a sleeper and
transfer it to the body of a dead man. The latter, therefore, comes to
life as the former dies. But the friends of the sleeper in turn engage a
wizard to steal the soul of another sleeper, who dies as the first sleeper
comes to life. In this way an indefinite succession of deaths and
resurrections is supposed to take place.(235)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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