Note 4 — VIII.—WITCHCRAFT AND DEMONOLOGY.

A very superficial comparison of Chinese and Western ideas on the subject of necromancy demonstrates their identity. The familiar stories of Jane Shore and the Countess of Soissons, accused respectively of making waxen images of the Duke of Gloucester and of Louis XIV. to compass their death; the less known account of the death of Ferdinand Earl of Derby, whose death by poison in the reign of Elizabeth was by popular credulity attributed to witchcraft, “a waxen image with hair like that of the unfortunate earl being found in his chamber and reducing every suspicion to certainty;” King James’ remarks in his Daemonology (Book II., Ch. V.) “that the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the names of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness”;—these and the host of similar stories recorded in our own and continental annals all find an exact reproduction in China.4 There is a well-known legend amongst the Cantonese of a builder having a grudge against a woman whose kitchen he was called upon to repair—(builders, as already noted, are believed to often practice witchcraft). The repairs were duly completed, but somehow or other the woman could never visit the kitchen without feeling ill. Convinced that witchcraft was at the bottom of it, she had the wall pulled down, and sure enough there was discovered in a hollow left for the purpose “a clay figure in a posture of sickness.” It may be noted that a reflex of the old English superstition that drawing blood from a witch renders her harmless is suggested by the Chinese belief regarding images such as that above described. Builders or plasterers are supposed to cut a gash in some part of their bodies whence the warm blood is injected into the interior of the image thus making it alive! Nor does Chinese superstition confine itself to clay images only. It is believed that certain wizards are able to endow with life figures cut out of paper with similar effects. In other cases these paper mannikins become the wizard’s familiars and obey all his orders. There is also a widespread superstition that the feathers of birds, after undergoing certain incantations, are thrown up into the air and being carried away by the wind work blight and destruction wherever they alight.