Note 125 — Introductory Essay on Caste (continued 2)

If the Gonds want a child to become fat, they put it in a pigsty or a place where asses have rolled, so that it may acquire by contact the quality of fatness belonging to the pigs or asses. If they wish to breed quarrels in an enemy’s house, they put the seeds of the amaltās or the quills of the porcupine in the thatch of the roof. The seeds in the dried pods of this tree rattle in the wind, while the fretful porcupine raises its quills when angry. Hence the seeds will impart the quality of noise to the house, so that its inmates will be noisy, while the quills of the porcupine will similarly breed strife between them. The effects produced by weapons and instruments are thought of in the same manner. We say that an arrow is shot from a bow with such force as to penetrate the body and cause a wound. The savage could not think or speak in this way, because he had no verbs and could not think of nouns in the objective case. He thought of the arrow as an animate thing having a cutting or piercing quality. When placed in a suitable position to exercise its powers, it flew, of its own volition, through the air to the target, and communicated to it by contact some of the above quality. The idea is more easily realised in the case of balls, pieces of bone or other missiles thrown by magicians. Here the person whom it is intended to injure may be miles away, so that the object could not possibly strike him merely through the force imparted to it by the thrower. But when the magician has said charms over the missile, communicating to it the power and desire to do his will, he throws it in the proper direction and savages believe that it will go of its own accord to the person against whom it is aimed and penetrate his body. To pretend to suck pieces of bone out of the body, which are supposed to have been propelled into the victim by an enemy, is one of the commonest magical methods of curing an illness. The following instances of this idea are taken from the admirable collection in The Golden Bough125: “(In Suffolk) if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted thorn. A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was festering, he remarked: ‘That didn’t ought to, for I greased the bush well after I pulled it out’ If a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the nail, clean it and grease it every day to prevent the wound from festering.” Here the heat and festering of the wounds are held to be qualities of the axe, thorn or nail, which have been communicated to the person or animal wounded by contact. If these qualities of the instrument are reduced by cleaning and oiling it, then that portion of them communicated to the wound, which was originally held to be a severed part of the life and qualities of the instrument, will similarly be made cool and easy. It is not probable that the people of Suffolk really believe this at present, but they retain the method of treatment arising from the belief without being able to explain it. Similarly the Hindus must have thought that the results produced by the tools of artisans working on materials, and by the plough on the earth, were communicated by these instruments volitionally through contact; and this is why they worship once or twice a year the implements of their profession as the givers of the means of subsistence. All the stories of magic swords, axes, impenetrable shields, sandals, lamps, carpets and so on originally arose from the same belief.