Note 30 — Chapter II · PRIMITIVE FREETHINKING

The explanation is partly that given by him later, that “a rain-maker seldom dies a natural death,”30 most being executed as impostors for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies.31 Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician “happens to have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other way.”32 “A celebrated magician,” says Burton again, “rarely if ever dies a natural death.”33 And it is told of the people of Niuē, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that “of old they had kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed, the end of it was that no one wished to be king.”34 So, in Uganda, if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, “his whole existence is at stake in times of distress.” One chief was actually driven out; and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance.35 In such a state of things religion might well lose vogue.