Note 59.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Incest enjoined in certain cases as a mode of ensuring good luck. It is very remarkable, however, that among tribes which strongly disapprove of incestuous relations in general, the act of incest is nevertheless positively enjoined in certain circumstances as a mode of ensuring good luck. Thus in the Thonga tribe of South-Eastern Africa, round about Delagoa Bay, there is a class of men who devote themselves to the business of hunting hippopotamuses on the rivers. In the pursuit of their trade they observe a number of curious superstitions which have been handed down among them for generations from father to son. For example, they inoculate themselves with a certain drug which is supposed to endow them with such a power over the hippopotamuses that when the hunter wounds one of them the animal cannot go far away and the man can track and despatch it. During the day the hunter fishes in the river, keeping his eye all the time on the unwieldy monsters disporting themselves in the water or lumbering through the thickets on the banks. Incest of Thonga hippopotamus hunter with his daughter. “When he sees that the propitious season has come and when he is ready to undertake a hunting expedition of one month, he first calls his own daughter to his hut and has sexual relations with her. This incestuous act, which is strongly taboo in ordinary life, has made of him a ‘murderer’: he has killed something at home; he has acquired the courage for doing great deeds on the river. Henceforth he will have no sexual relations with his wives during the whole campaign. On the same night, immediately after the act, he starts with his sons; they close the drift where the beasts leave the river by putting a canoe across the track.” Meantime the hippopotamuses are browsing in the forest or trampling down the crops of the fields in their clumsy fashion. As they come trooping back to the river they are stopped by the canoe in the path, and while they are examining the strange obstacle, the hunters, lying in ambush, dart their spears into the thick hides of the beasts. The handles of the spears are loosely attached to the blades, but connected with them by a long string, so that when the wounded monster, crashing irresistibly in his rage through the thicket, plunges into the river and sinks out of sight in the water, the handle of the spear becomes detached from the blade and floats like a buoy on the surface, shewing the direction taken by the beast. As soon as the hunter has thrown his spear he runs home to tell his wife. She must at once shut herself up in the hut and remain perfectly quiet, without eating or drinking or crushing her mealies; for were she to do any of these things, the wounded hippopotamus would shew fight and might kill her husband, whereas if she keeps quiet, the animal will be quiet too. All the hunters in the village are then called up, and embarking in a canoe, paddle away after their prey, whose retreat is marked by the bobbing of the spear-handle on the surface of the water and the occasional emergence of a great flat snout to breathe. When the beast has been despatched, and the carcase landed on the bank, it is turned on its back and the hunter creeps between its legs from behind and along its belly and chest as far as the mouth. Then he goes away. By this ceremony the man is supposed to take upon himself the defilement, possibly the nature, of the animal, so that in future when he meets hippopotamuses the animals will not perceive him to be a man but will mistake him for an hippopotamus; and thus he will be able to slaughter the deluded creatures with impunity.59.1