Note 1 — Chapter II · SACRIFICE

We are now in a position to realise the attitude of the Kikuyu mind towards thahu, and it is considered that the term curse, in its mediaeval sense, expresses it. Everyone will remember in the Ingoldsby Legends the pitiable condition of the Jackdaw of Rheims after he had been cursed by the Cardinal for stealing his ring; now this would appeal to a Kikuyu, and he would at once say the jackdaw was thahu. In one of the cases of thahu, quoted hereafter, it is possible for a person to lay a curse maliciously on a whole village by breaking a cooking pot, and in another instance, a father can lay a curse on his son for disobedience. We thus have parallel instances from both higher and lower civilisation; in the first, the Cardinal curses the jackdaw with the help of the supernatural powers with which he is invested by virtue of his sacred position, and in the lower culture it is apparently held that any person can inflict a curse by invoking the supernatural powers of the ngoma, or spirits, of the dead ancestors.1