Note 132.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

This perhaps also is, as Professor Westermarck suggests, a conditional curse. Now a curse, like other magical proceedings before referred to, is primarily a relief of overcharged feelings. Uttered with all the strength of those feelings by an aggrieved or baffled adversary, it evokes even in our breasts to-day shuddering and horror. Much more then in days when the man’s orenda was deemed to go out in speech with immediate result upon the object to which he directed it. When gods came to be adopted and worshipped, strength was added to the curse by invocation of the god. The god’s name added to the curse was an addition of the god himself. For the name is a part, and an important part, of the god, and cannot be used without effect. The god is bound to respond to it, and to act in accordance with the votary’s demand. For this reason the real names of gods were kept secret. Mystery thus attached to the name of the God of the Hebrews: hence the express prohibition to “take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Almost all over the world this belief in efficacy of the uttered name as a means of compulsion is responsible not merely for taboos on the names of gods, and of men living or dead, but also for the form and potency of magical formulæ. If you know the name of a spirit and utter it, or sometimes even threaten to utter it, you compel the owner’s attention to your wants. Or you may pretend to be some great personage, such as (wherever the Mohammedan tradition has penetrated) King Solomon or the angel Gabriel; and in that name you may issue your commands. Or, as among Christians, you call for the obedience of a spirit in the great name of God or the Lord Jesus Christ. In India to repeat the divine name aloud, or even by way of meditation, “is the most usual way of acquiring religious merit.… So much importance is given to this mode of meditation that Tulsidas in his Ramayan lays down that the name of Rama is greater than Rama himself.” In other words, its utterance compels him. “It is said of a certain Hindu who had notoriously lived a life of impiety that he obtained salvation by calling on his deathbed for his son by his name, which happened to be Nârâyan.”132.1 The name Nârâyan is sacred. It was originally a title of Brahmâ, but is now usually applied to Vishnu, and is that under which he was first worshipped.132.2