The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and ReligionFrazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
ONCE more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow or to be
still. When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he
takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish,
winds a horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick.
He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze
begins to blow. In order to procure a cool wind for nine days the
stone should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and
then presented to the sun, while the sorcerer makes three turns
contrary to the course of the luminary. If a Hottentot desires the
wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on the
end of a pole, in the belief that by blowing the skin down the wind
will lose all its force and must itself fall. Fuegian wizards throw
shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of the island
of Bibili, off New Guinea, are reputed to make wind by blowing with
their mouths. In stormy weather the Bogadjim people say, "The Bibili
folk are at it again, blowing away." Another way of making wind
which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a "wind-stone" lightly
with a stick; to strike it hard would bring on a hurricane. So in
Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water
and beating it thrice on a stone, saying:
"I knok this rag upone this stane
To raise the wind in the divellis name,
It sall not lye till I please againe."
In Greenland a woman in child-bed and for some time after delivery
is supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She has only to
go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and coming back into the
house blow it out again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth
which enjoyed the reputation of being able to still the raging wind;
but we do not know in what manner its members exercised a useful
function, which probably earned for them a more solid recompense
than mere repute among the seafaring population of the isthmus. Even
in Christian times, under the reign of Constantine, a certain
Sopater suffered death at Constantinople on a charge of binding the
winds by magic, because it happened that the corn-ships of Egypt and
Syria were detained afar off by calms or head-winds, to the rage and
disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used
to sell wind to storm-stayed mariners. The wind was enclosed in
three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moderate wind sprang
up; if the second, it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane.
Indeed the Esthonians, whose country is divided from Finland only by
an arm of the sea, still believe in the magical powers of their
northern neighbours. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the
north and north-east, bringing ague and rheumatic inflammations in
their train, are set down by the simple Esthonian peasantry to the
machinations of the Finnish wizards and witches. In particular they
regard with special dread three days in spring to which they give
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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