The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 08 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 08 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
take the dough figure instead of a real person.
(M83) Again, effigies are often employed as a means of preventing or
curing sickness; the demons of disease either mistake the effigies for
living people or are persuaded or compelled to enter them, leaving the
real men and women well and whole.(276) Thus the Alfoors of Minahassa, in
Celebes, will sometimes transport a sick man to another house, while they
leave on his bed a dummy made up of a pillow and clothes. This dummy the
demon is supposed to mistake for the sick man, who consequently
recovers.(277) Cure or prevention of this sort seems to find especial
favour with the Dyaks of Borneo. Thus, when an epidemic is raging among
them, the Dyaks of the Katoengouw river set up wooden images at their
doors in the hope that the demons of the plague may be deluded into
carrying off the effigies instead of the people.(278) Among the Oloh
Ngadju of Borneo, when a sick man is supposed to be suffering from the
assaults of a ghost, puppets of dough or rice-meal are made and thrown
under the house as substitutes for the patient, who thus rids himself of
the ghost. So if a man has been attacked by a crocodile and has contrived
to escape, he makes a puppet of dough or meal and casts it into the water
as a vicarious offering; otherwise the water-god, who is conceived in the
shape of a crocodile, might be angry.(279) In certain of the western
districts of Borneo if a man is taken suddenly and violently sick, the
physician, who in this part of the world is generally an old woman,
fashions a wooden image and brings it seven times into contact with the
sufferer’s head, while she says: “This image serves to take the place of
the sick man; sickness, pass over into the image.” Then, with some rice,
salt, and tobacco in a little basket, the substitute is carried to the
spot where the evil spirit is supposed to have entered into the man. There
it is set upright on the ground, after the physician has invoked the
spirit as follows: “O devil, here is an image which stands instead of the
sick man. Release the soul of the sick man and plague the image, for it is
indeed prettier and better than he.” Similar substitutes are used almost
daily by these Dyaks for the purpose of drawing off evil influences from
anybody’s person. Thus, when an Ot Danom baby will not stop squalling, its
maternal grandmother takes a large leaf, fashions it into a puppet to
represent the child, and presses it against the infant’s body. Having thus
decanted the spirit, so to speak, from the baby into the puppet, she
pierces the effigy with little arrows from a blow-gun, thereby killing the
spirit that had vexed her child.(280) Similarly in the island of Dama,
between New Guinea and Celebes, where sickness is ascribed to the agency
of demons, the doctor makes a doll of palm-leaf and lays it, together with
some betel, rice, and half of an empty eggshell, on the patient’s head.
Lured by this bait the demon quits the sufferer’s body and enters the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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