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
The Indians of the Nass River, in British Columbia, are impressed
with a belief that a physician may swallow his patient's soul by
mistake. A doctor who is believed to have done so is made by the
other members of the faculty to stand over the patient, while one of
them thrusts his fingers down the doctor's throat, another kneads
him in the stomach with his knuckles, and a third slaps him on the
back. If the soul is not in him after all, and if the same process
has been repeated upon all the medical men without success, it is
concluded that the soul must be in the head-doctor's box. A party of
doctors, therefore, waits upon him at his house and requests him to
produce his box. When he has done so and arranged its contents on a
new mat, they take the votary of Aesculapius and hold him up by the
heels with his head in a hole in the floor. In this position they
wash his head, and "any water remaining from the ablution is taken
and poured upon the sick man's head." No doubt the lost soul is in
the water.
3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection
BUT the spiritual dangers I have enumerated are not the only ones
which beset the savage. Often he regards his shadow or reflection as
his soul, or at all events as a vital part of himself, and as such
it is necessarily a source of danger to him. For if it is trampled
upon, struck, or stabbed, he will feel the injury as if it were done
to his person; and if it is detached from him entirely (as he
believes that it may be) he will die. In the island of Wetar there
are magicians who can make a man ill by stabbing his shadow with a
pike or hacking it with a sword. After Sankara had destroyed the
Buddhists in India, it is said that he journeyed to Nepaul, where he
had some difference of opinion with the Grand Lama. To prove his
supernatural powers, he soared into the air. But as he mounted up
the Grand Lama, perceiving his shadow swaying and wavering on the
ground, struck his knife into it and down fell Sankara and broke his
neck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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