Note 2 — INTRODUCTION

Not a few of the customs and beliefs described by Mr Hobley remind us of similar practices and ideas in the religion and mythology of classical antiquity. Thus the warriors who, armed with swords and clubs, dance or hop from foot to foot at the time when the mawele grain is reaped, are curiously reminiscent of the Roman Salii, the dancing or leaping priests of the war-god Mars, who, similarly accoutred with swords and staves, danced or leaped, while they invoked Saturn, the God of Sowing. Again, the strange sort of madness which from time to time seizes on Kamba women and under the influence of which, wrought up to a state of frenzy, they caper about with cow’s tails suspended from their arms, offers a parallel to the Greek legend of the daughters of Prœtus and the other Argive women, who, oddly enough, were said like their African sisters to have been healed of their infirmity by dances and the sacrifice of cattle.2 The study of such hysterical and infectious manias among primitive peoples opens up an interesting field of inquiry to the psychologist.