Note 108.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Injurious effect of wife’s infidelity on her husband. The Zulus imagine that an unfaithful wife who touches her husband’s furniture without first eating certain herbs causes him to be seized with a fit of coughing of which he soon dies. Moreover, among the Zulus “a man who has had criminal intercourse with a sick person’s wife is prohibited from visiting the sick-chamber; and, if the sick person is a woman, any female who has committed adultery with her husband must not visit her. They say that, if these visits ever take place, the patient is immediately oppressed with a cold perspiration and dies. This prohibition was thought to find out the infidelities of the women and to make them fear discovery.”108.1 African chiefs thought to be injuriously affected by the incontinence of their subjects. For a similar reason, apparently, during the sickness of a Caffre chief his tribe was bound to observe strict continence under pain of death.108.2 The notion seems to have been that any act of incontinence would through some sort of magical sympathy prove fatal to the sick chief. The Ovakumbi, a tribe in the south of Angola, think that the carnal intercourse of young people under the age of puberty would cause the king to die within the year, if it were not severely punished. The punishment for such a treasonable offence used to be death.108.3 Similarly, in the kingdom of Congo, when the sacred pontiff, called the Chitomé, was going his rounds throughout the country, all his subjects had to live strictly chaste, and any person found guilty of incontinence at such times was put to death without mercy. They thought that universal chastity was essential to the preservation of the life of the pontiff, whom they revered as the head of their religion and their common father. Accordingly when he was abroad he took care to warn his faithful subjects by a public crier, that no man might plead ignorance as an excuse for a breach of the law.108.4