The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
Similarly, the killing of his _nagual_ causes the death of a
Central American Indian, the killing of his bush soul causes the death of
a Calabar negro, the killing of his _tamaniu_ causes the death of a Banks
Islander, and the killing of the animal in which his life is stowed away
causes the death of the giant or warlock in the fairy tale.
(M171) Thus it appears that the story of “The giant who had no heart in
his body” may perhaps furnish the key to the relation which is supposed to
subsist between a man and his totem. The totem, on this theory, is simply
the receptacle in which a man keeps his life, as Punchkin kept his life in
a parrot, and Bidasari kept her soul in a golden fish. It is no valid
objection to this view that when a savage has both a sex totem and a clan
totem his life must be bound up with two different animals, the death of
either of which would entail his own. If a man has more vital places than
one in his body, why, the savage may think, should he not have more vital
places than one outside it? Why, since he can put his life outside
himself, should he not transfer one portion of it to one animal and
another to another? The divisibility of life, or, to put it otherwise, the
plurality of souls, is an idea suggested by many familiar facts, and has
commended itself to philosophers like Plato,(589) as well as to savages.
It finds favour also with the sages of China, who tell us that every human
being is provided with what may be called a male soul (_shen_) and a
female soul (_kwei_), which by their harmonious co-operation compose an
organic unity. However, some Chinese philosophers will have it that each
of the five viscera has its own separate male soul (_shen_); and a Taoist
treatise written about the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh
century has even enriched science with a list of about three dozen souls
distributed over the various parts of the human frame; indeed, not content
with a bare catalogue of these souls, the learned author has annexed to
the name and surname of each a brief description of its size and stature,
of the kind of dress in which it is clothed and the shape of hat it
wears.(590) It is only when the notion of a soul, from being a
quasi-scientific hypothesis, becomes a theological dogma that its unity
and indivisibility are insisted upon as essential. The savage, unshackled
by dogma, is free to explain the facts of life by the assumption of as
many souls as he thinks necessary. Hence, for example, the Caribs supposed
that there was one soul in the head, another in the heart, and other souls
at all the places where an artery is felt pulsating.(591) Some of the
Hidatsa Indians explain the phenomena of gradual death, when the
extremities appear dead first, by supposing that man has four souls, and
that they quit the body, not simultaneously, but one after the other,
dissolution being only complete when all four have departed.(592) Some of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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