Note 93.1 — Chapter IX · WITCHCRAFT: SYMPATHETIC MAGIC.

Nor is it merely to clothes and personal ornaments that this intimate and sympathetic connection with their owner’s life is ascribed. It might be supposed that the constant visible and tangible association of these things with the man himself might render it difficult to disintegrate the image thus formed in the slowly working mind of a savage, and that this might be the reason for their identification (for it amounts to nothing less) with his personality. Or it might be argued that, as is distinctly suggested in certain cases, they have become saturated with his sweat by repeated use, and thereby become an outlying portion of his body. The identification, however, is extended to things we should suppose more easily dissociated from him, to things but rarely coming beneath his touch. The Wanyoro of Central Africa imagine that straws from the thatch of a dwelling may be so charmed as to bring calamity upon its owner.93.1 When Captain Speke was in Unyoro, the king, Kamrasi, sent some one to steal some grass from the thatch of a Chopi chief, “in order that he might spread a charm on the Chopi people, and gain such an influence over them that their spears could not prevail against the Wanyoro.”93.2 In the Isle of Man, one fisherman can rob another of his luck by plucking a straw from the latter’s cottage as he passes it on his way to fishing.93.3 A woman of Kirk Lonan in the same island confessed, on the 31st of July 1712, to a charge of having taken up some earth from under a neighbour’s door and burnt it to ashes, which she had given to her cattle, “with an intention, as she owns, to make them give more milk”—in other words, to a charge of stealing by magical means the milk from her neighbour’s cows.93.4 In Denmark, to steal fishing-tackle is to rob the fisher of his luck. For a similar reason, no Esthonian farmer is willing to give earth from his cornfields.93.5 In southern Bohemia the sweepings must not be allowed to lie before the house-door, else the witches will be enabled by its means to lame the inhabitants, as well as to ascertain what is going on in the house.93.6 In the Tirol an enemy can be ruined by cutting a turf from one’s own ground and throwing it on his roof; while a Fijian can bewitch his foe by burying certain leaves in the foe’s garden or hiding them in his thatch.94.1 The Annamites are said by Dr. Bartels, I know not on what authority, to effect a spell of injury by driving a nail into a plank of the victim’s ship or one of the posts of his house.94.2 As long as the men are away from a Dyak village on a warlike expedition their fires are lighted on their hearths as if they were at home. “The mats are spread and the fires kept up till late in the evening, and lighted again before dawn, so that the men may not be cold. The roofing of the house is opened before dawn, so that the men may not lie too long and so fall into the hands of the enemy.”94.3 The belief in the inseparable connection of a person and his property seems to have limited to some slight extent the indiscriminate almsgiving practised in many European, especially Roman Catholic, countries. It is deemed prudent always to refuse persons suspected of witchcraft; and at certain times, as on the occasion of a birth or death, or even when a cow has calved, every one must be refused. To give fire on these occasions, or on various days of the year, is highly dangerous, and it is by no means safe at any time. Mr. Frederick Starr, the Curator of the Natural History Museum at New York, records a case of witchcraft that came under his own notice among the German population of Pennsylvania, where the trouble was traced to the giving of a match to the sorceress to light her pipe.95.1 Nor is the superstition unknown to the American aborigines, as witness the attempt mentioned in the last chapter of the Shawnee prophet to persuade John Tanner that his life was dependent on his lodge fire. And the Moravian missionaries found it in Greenland, where one of the things a pregnant woman may not permit is the lighting of a match at her lamp.95.2