Chapter IX · WITCHCRAFT: SYMPATHETIC MAGIC.

“Thy sister is far beneath;

This message did she bequeath:

Earth, open wide! When a sister is bride

The folktales I have just cited present in an ascending series, first, the divisibility of a person, secondly, the continued sympathy of the severed portions with the bulk, and thirdly, the endowment of each of the severed portions with speech and power—in other words, with consciousness and reason. The identification of the severed portions with the whole is thus complete in the stories. Nor are we without illustrations in practical superstition of this belief. The two examples already given afford a striking exhibition of the truth which I may perhaps be pardoned for insisting on with wearisome iteration, that, namely, of the dependence of folktales on custom and belief. It is, however, in the practices of witchcraft that we find the severed portions of a person most frequently and completely identified with the whole. To some of these practices we will accordingly now turn our attention.

Witchcraft is usually wrought in one or more of three ways—by incantations or curses, by symbolic actions, or (and it is this only with which we are now concerned) by acts done upon objects identified with the person intended to be affected. Among these objects severed portions of his body take the first rank.

The results of the practices of which these poor girls were convicted were terrible enough to them, if not to their supposed victim. Yet if their depositions exhausted their knowledge of the modes of witchcraft they cannot have penetrated far into its mysteries. A jealous Italian woman or a mischievous Gipsy, a North American Indian or an Australian savage, could have given them points.

But superstition stops not with a man’s property and the produce of his labour any more than with portions of his body or his garments and ornaments. Things arbitrarily associated with him, if the proper ceremonies be observed, and the proper incantations muttered or sung, may be made effectual instruments of injury as if they were parts of himself. His name, it may be argued, is something peculiarly his own; and a portrait, if any resemblance be traceable to the person represented, may bear identification with him. But, as I have already pointed out, likeness is by no means necessary. If it be enough, in order to constitute a life-token, merely to attribute connection at the will of the person inquiring concerning the absent, it must be enough also for the purpose of bewitching him. What is valid in the one case must be valid in the other. So much has been written on the aspects of savage thought concerning personal names and personal portraits, and on the images made for the purposes of witchcraft, that I need not do more than point out that the profane use of images for witchcraft is exactly parallel to the sacred use of images of gods and saints. If by sticking a pin into a waxen figure, or melting it in the fire, I can torture and do to death the person whom the figure represents, the converse process of honouring and feeding and pacifying with incense and adoration will have its effect upon the deity whose image is thus treated. Wherever he may be, he is present by means of the sympathy between the picture or the statue and himself, a sympathy thus indistinguishable from identity. Practically of course this involves omnipresence. The difficulty is not felt by the savage. If the theologian feel it, he can explain it away in a crowd of unctuous phrases, or smother his common sense with the authority of the Church. The scientific investigator can do neither. The only theory of the superstition he can present is that which is educed from a comparison of analogous cases, namely, that just as hair and other portions of the body, when severed in outward appearance, yet maintain an essential connection with it, so images bearing the name of, or intended to represent, an absent man or a deity are an extension of his person, bound to it by an invisible and indivisible link. That a ceremony should be required to perfect the bond, to complete the connection, is only to be expected; and naturally this ceremony is fully developed in solemn and formal worship and the higher sorcery. But the ritual of consecration depends upon another principle—that of the power of certain forms of words when uttered in a prescribed manner to bring about the fulfilment of a wish—the discussion whereof is foreign to this inquiry.

The principle applied in these instances appears to be a logical extension of that which identifies a man with his property. The thief is identified with the articles he has possessed himself of, and is affected by means of a portion of the bulk to which they belong, and whence he has severed them. In this country the identification is usually arbitrary, no contact being attempted. The heart of some animal, as a sheep, a hare, or a pigeon, is procured and stuck full of pins; and a form of words is pronounced similar to those in the Transylvanian example. In a case mentioned by Mr. Henderson as occurring no longer ago than the year 1861, a live pigeon was thus tortured and pierced to the heart, and then roasted, the object being to punish and discover a witch who was believed to have killed some horses by means of the Evil Eye. This kind of incantation is perhaps more usual in philtres, or where the girl betrayed seeks to avenge herself upon her lover. Mr. Henderson quotes the following directions from The Universal Fortune Teller: “Let any unmarried woman take the blade-bone of a shoulder of lamb, and borrowing a penknife (without saying for what purpose) she must, on going to bed, stick the knife once through the bone every night for nine nights in succession in different places, repeating every night while so doing these words:

’Tis not this bone I mean to stick,

But my lover’s heart I mean to prick;

Wishing him neither rest nor sleep

Till he comes to me to speak.

The superstitions we have discussed in the present chapter disclose a parallel range to those of the Life-token. First we find witchcraft exercised upon detached portions of the victim’s body, identified with himself by the same process of thought as that analysed in the last chapter. The remains of his food are equally liable to hostile practices, because they are a portion of something which he has incorporated into his own substance. Clothing and the dust or mud of naked footprints would also be likely to retain sweat, hairs and specks of skin available for the sorcerer’s purpose; and it may well be believed that this was the original reason for treating other articles of property in the like manner. But with the accumulation of property of all kinds the real reason for the use of such things would fade, and the procedure would degenerate into mere simulation. The process would be facilitated by the superstition of regarding a man’s name as a part of himself. Any one who knew another’s real name, by imputing it to some convenient object, could identify that object with his enemy, and work his will upon it, and upon his enemy through it. There is, however, a wide tract of borderland where the underlying reason for the practices is vague, and it is consequently difficult, or impossible, to determine whether the injuries are believed to be inflicted on something essentially part of the victim, or are no more than symbolic. But here as elsewhere symbolism is the offspring of an earlier practice; it is the form which remains when the real practice can no longer be repeated. It points unmistakably to injuries originally inflicted on something regarded as actually part of, and so united with, the victim, though in appearance detached, that he will suffer all that it receives.

These cases all seem explicable by the supposition that the witch has united herself in some way with the object of her spells, and thus injury inflicted upon it, by any other hand than hers, will reach and injure her. This is clearly so, for instance, where she bewitches cattle to draw away their milk. There she may be punished by vindictive action upon the milk, or upon the kine producing it. It is hardly less clear where she has, in the shape of a nightmare, appropriated an unfortunate man or animal as her steed; and the same reasoning applies to all the rest. Perhaps it may not be considered an unwarrantable stretch of barbarous logic to regard the casting of a spell as an act of appropriation parallel to theft. Theft, however, like any other act of appropriation, sets up union between the person appropriating, and the article appropriated. Ownership, by the process of thought I have endeavoured already to trace, is in fact union; and injury inflicted upon a man’s property is in a literal sense inflicted on himself.