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
After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die.
This charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic and
contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of
an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him,
namely, his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay
charm, which resembles the Ojebway practice still more closely, is
to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees' comb and of the length
of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is
blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the head, and his
head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you
would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards;
enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as if you were
praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a path where
your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that his blood
may not be on your head, you should say:
"It is not I who am burying him,
It is Gabriel who is burying him."
Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the
archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than
you are.
If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has
commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting
obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more
rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping
others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate
childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the
Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will
make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing
that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar
Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man
who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to
Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which
the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would suckle it. Then the
father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the
woman's head, saying, "O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall,
let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall
and descend into my hands and on my lap." Then he asks the woman,
"Has the child come?" and she answers, "Yes, it is sucking already."
After that the man holds the fowl on the husband's head, and mumbles
some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together
with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the
ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has
been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here
the pretence that a child has been born is a purely magical rite
designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child
really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy
of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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