God is a Thought, God is an Idea, but its Reference is to Something that Transcends All Thinking.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

We want to think about God. 

God is a thought, God is an idea, 

but its reference is to something 

that transcends all thinking. 

I mean, He’s beyond being, 

beyond the category of 

being or nonbeing. 

Is he or is he not? 

Neither is nor is not.

Every God, every mythology, 

every religion, is True in this sense: 

it is True as metaphorical 

of the human and cosmic mystery.

He who thinks 

he knows doesn’t know. 

He who knows that 

he doesn’t know, knows.

There is an old story that is still good — the story of the quest, the spiritual quest, that is to say, to find the inward thing that you basically are. 

All of these symbols in mythology refer to you — 

have you been reborn? 

Have you died to your animal nature 

and come to life as a human incarnation? 

You are God in 

your deepest identity. 

You are one with the transcendent.

BILL MOYERS: 

The images of God are many. 

Joseph Campbell called them

 “the masks of eternity,” 

and said they both cover and reveal the face of glory. 

All our names and images for God are masks, Campbell said, 

they signify that ultimate reality, 

which by definition transcends 

language and art.

A myth is a mask of God, too, 

a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. 

As teacher, scholar and writer, Joseph Campbell spent his life in the study of comparative religion. 

He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures. 

We go east of Suez and see people dancing before a bewildering array of fantastic gods. 

When those people come here, well, 

Campbell told the story of the young Hindu who called on him in New York and said, 

“When I visit a foreign country, 

I like to acquaint myself with its religion. 

So I bought myself a Bible 

and for some months now 

have been reading it 

from the beginning. 

But, you know, 

I can’t find any religion in it.”

Campbell, who became president of the American Society for the Study or Religion, was at home in the sacred scriptures of all the world’s great faiths. He found comparable stories in them: stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, judgment days. Quoting one of his favorite Hindu scriptures which he translated from the Sanskrit, he concluded that “truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.”

Joseph Campbell began his journey into this literature of the spirit after his imagination was excited by a visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York when he was just a boy. We met there a few months before his death and talked through a long evening, about the masks or eternity.

Is there something in common in every culture that creates this need for God?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think anyone who has an experience of mystery and awe knows that there is a dimension, let’s say, or the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads, “When, before a sunset or a mountain and the beauty of this or that, you pause and say, ‘Ah, that is participation in divinity.'” And I think that’s what it is, it’s the realization of wonder. And also the experience of tremendous power, which people of course living in the world of nature are experiencing all the time. You know there’s something there that’s much bigger than the human dimension.

And our way of thinking in the West largely is that God is the source of the energy. The way in most Oriental thinking, and I think in most of what we call primitive thinking, also, is that God is the manifestation of the energy, not its source, that God is the vehicle of the energy. And the level of energy that is involved or represented determines the character of the god. There are gods of violence, there are gods or compassion, there are gods that unite the two, there are gods that are the protectors of kings in their war campaigns. These are personifications of the energy that’s in play, and what the source of the energy is. What’s the source of the energy in these lights around us? I mean, this is a total mystery.

BILL MOYERS: Doesn’t this make of faith an anarchy, a sort of continuing war among principalities?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: As life is, yes. I mean, even in your mind, when it comes to doing anything, there will be a war. A decision as to priorities, what should you do now? Or, in relationship to other people, there will be four or five possibilities of my way of action. And the notion of divinity or divine life in my mind would be what would determine my decision. If it were rather crude, it would be a rather crude decision.

BILL MOYERS: But is divinity just what we think?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: What does that do to faith?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it’s a tough one about faith.

BILL MOYERS: You are a man of faith-

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’m not…

BILL MOYERS: You’re a man of wonder and…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.

BILL MOYERS: What kind of experience?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I’ve experience of the wonder, of the life, I have experience of love, I have experience of hatred, malice — I’d like to punch the guy’s jaw, and I admit this. But those are different divinities, I mean, from the point of view of a symbolic imaging. Those are different images operating in me.

For instance, when I was a little boy and was being brought up a Roman Catholic, I was told I had a guardian angel on my right side and a tempting devil on my left, and when it came to making a decision of what I would do, the decision would depend on which one had most influence on me. And I must say that in my boyhood, and I think also in the people who were teaching me, they actually concretized those thoughts.

BILL MOYERS: They did what?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It was an angel. That angel is a fact and the devil is a fact, do you see; otherwise, one thinks of them as metaphors for the energies that are afflicting and guiding you.

BILL MOYERS: And those energies come from?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: From your own life. The energy of your own body, the different organs in your body, including your head, are the conflict systems.

BILL MOYERS: And your life comes from where?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, there you are. From the ultimate energy that’s the life of the universe. And then you say, well, somebody has to generate that. Why do you have to say that? Why can’t it be impersonal? That would be Brahman, that would be the transcendent mystery, that you can also personify.

BILL MOYERS: Can men and women live with an impersonality?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, they do all over the place. Just go east of Suez. In the East, the gods are much more elemental.

BILL MOYERS: Elemental?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Elemental, less human and more like the powers of nature. I see a deity as representing an energy system, and part of the energy system is the human energy systems of love and malice, hate, benevolence, compassion. And in Oriental thinking, the god is the vehicle of the energy, not its source.

BILL MOYERS: Well, of course the heart of the Christian faith is that these elemental forces you’re talking about embodied themselves in a human being in reconciling mankind to God.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. And the basic Buddhist idea is that that is true of you, as well, and that what Jesus was a person who realized that in himself, and lived out of the Christhood of his nature.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think about Jesus?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: We just don’t, know about Jesus. All we know are four contradictory texts that tell us what he did.

BILL MOYERS: Written many years after he lived.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: But I think we know what Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus are probably pretty close. But when you read the Thomas gospel, the Gospel According to Thomas, which was dug up there in that, with those other gnostic texts, it has all the flavor of one of the synoptics, Matthew, Mark or Luke, except that it doesn’t say quite the same thing.

There’s one wonderful passage, it’s the last one in the gospel, actually. “When will the kingdom come?” Now, in Mark 13, I think it is, we hear that the end of the world is going to come. That is to say, a mythological image, that is, the end of the world, is taken as a reference to an actual, physical, historical fact to be. When you read the Thomas gospel, Jesus says, “The kingdom of the father will not come by expectation; the kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”

So I look at you now in that sense and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me, through you.

BILL MOYERS: Through me?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You, sure.

BILL MOYERS: A journalist?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Jesus also says in this text, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he. “He’s talking from the point of view of that being of beings which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us. And anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. And anyone who incarnates, or rather brings into his life the message of the Word, is equivalent to Jesus. That’s the sense of that.

BILL MOYERS: 

So that’s what you mean when you say,

 “I am radiating God to you.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

You are, yes.

BILL MOYERS: And you to me.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And I’m speaking this seriously, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, I take it seriously. I happen to believe the same as you without being able to articulate it as you do. I do sense that there is divinity. The divinity is in the other.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: So you are the vehicle, you are as it were radiant of the spirit. And that’s…why not recognize it?

BILL MOYERS: I’ll tell you what the most gripping scripture in the Christian New Testament is for me. It says, “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I believe in what?

BILL MOYERS: I believe in this ultimate reality, and that I can experience it, that I do experience it, but I don’t have answers to my questions. I believe in the question, Is there a God?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

I had a very amusing experience, which might be well worth telling. 

I was in the New York Athletic Club swimming pool, and you know, you don’t wear your collar this way or that way when you’re in a swimming pool. 

And I was introduced to a priest, 

“This is Father So-and-so, 

this is Joseph Campbell.” 

I’m a professor, he’s a professor 

at one of our Catholic universities. 

So after I’d had my swim, 

I came and sat down beside, in what we call, you know, 

the horizontal athlete situation, 

and the priest is beside me. 

And he said, 

“Mr. Campbell, are you A Priest?” 

I said, 

“No, Father.” 

He said, 

“Are you a Catholic?” 

I said, 

“I was, Father.” 

He said, and now he had 

the sense to ask it this way, 

“Do you believe in a personal God?” 

I said, 

“No, Father.” 

And he said, 

“Well, I suppose there is no way to prove by logic the existence of a personal God.” 

And I said, 

“If there were, Father, 

what would be the value of faith?” 

“Well, Mr. Campbell, 

it’s nice to have met you.” 

And he was off. I really felt I had done a jujitsu trick there.

But that was a very illuminating conversation to me. 

The fact that he asked, 

“Do you believe in a personal God?” 

that meant that he also recognised the possibility of the Brahman, 

of the transcendent energy.

BILL MOYERS: 

Well, then, what is religion?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, the word religion means religio, linking back, linking back the phenomenal person to a source. 

If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. 

And this becomes symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link.

BILL MOYERS: 

Your friend Jung, the great psychologist, says that the most powerful religious symbol is the circle. 

He says, 

“The circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind, 

that in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self.” 

And I find you, in your own work 

throughout the course of your life, coming across the circle, 

whether it’s in the magical designs of the world over, 

whether it’s in the architecture both ancient and modern, 

whether it’s in the dome-shaped temples of India 

or the calendar stones of the Aztecs, 

or the ancient Chinese bronze shields, 

or the visions of the 

Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, 

whom you talk about, 

the wheel in the sky. 

You keep coming across this image.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Yes, it’s an ever-present thing. 

It’s the center from which you’ve come, 

back to which you go. 

I remember reading in a book about the American Indians, 

called The Indian Book, by Natalie Curtis, 

it was published around 1904, 

her conversation with a chief. 

I think it was a chief of the Pawnee tribe. 

And among the things he said was, 

“When we pitch camp, 

we pitch the camp in a circle. 

When we looked at the horizon, 

the horizon was in a circle. 

When the eagle builds a nest, 

the nest is in circle.” 

And then you read in Plato somewhere, the soul is a circle. 

I suppose the circle represents. totality. 

Within the circle is one thing, 

it is encircled, it’s enframed. 

That would be the spatial aspect, 

but the temporal aspect 

of the circle is, you leave, 

go somewhere and come back, 

the alpha and omega. 

God is the alpha and omega, 

the source and the end. 

Somehow the circle suggests immediately 

a completed totality, 

whether in time or in space.

BILL MOYERS: 

No beginning, no end.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, round and round and round. 

The year, well, this is November again, you know, and we’re about to have Thanksgiving again. 

We’re about to have Christmas again. 

And then not only the year, but the month, 

the moon cycle, and the day cycle. 

And this is we’re reminded of this when we look on our watch and see the cycle of time, 

it’s the same hour, the same hour but another day, 

and all that sort of thing.

BILL MOYERS: 

Why do you suppose the circle 

became so universally symbolic?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, because it’s experienced all the time. 

You experience it in the day 

and the year, just as we’ve said, 

and you experience in leaving home, 

going on your adventure, 

hunting or whatever it may be, 

and coming back to home. 

And then there’s a deeper one also, that mystery of 

the womb and the tomb. 

When people are buried it’s for rebirth, 

I mean, that’s the origin of the burial idea, 

you’re put back into the womb 

of Mother Earth for rebirth.

BILL MOYERS: 

And Jung kept returning to that theme of the circle 

as being the sort of universal symbol.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, Jung used it as 

a pedagogical device, actually, 

what he called the mandala. 

This was actually a Hindu term 

for a sacred circle.

BILL MOYERS: 

Here is one of the pictures.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s a very elaborate mandala. You have the deity at the center, with the power source, the illumination source, and these are the manifestations or aspects of its radiance. But in working out a mandala for oneself, what one does is draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems in your life, the different value systems in your life, and try then to compose them and find what the center is. It’s kind of discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, finding a center and ordering yourself to it. So you’re trying to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.

BILL MOYERS: 

To be at the center.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

At the center. 

The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. And when you realize what pollen is, it’s the life source. And it’s a single, single path, the center, and then they were saying, “Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.”

Navaho pollen path

So the little cosmos of one’s own life and the macrocosm of the world’s life are in some way to be coordinated. Well, for instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing ceremonies were conducted by way of sand paintings, which were mostly mandalas, on the ground and then the person who is to be treated moves into the mandala. There will be a mythological context that he will be identifying with, and he identifies himself with that power. And this idea of sand painting with mandalas and used for meditation purposes appears also in Tibet in the great Tantric monasteries outside of Lhasa. For instance, Rgyud Stod, they practiced sand painting, cosmic images and so forth indicating the forces of the spiritual powers that operate in our lives.

BILL MOYERS: Now, what do you make or that, that in two very different cultures, the same imagery emerges?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, well, there are only two ways to explain it, and one is by diffusion, that an influence came from there to here, and the other is by separate development. And when you have the idea of separate development, this speaks for certain powers in the psyche which are common to all mankind. Otherwise you couldn’t have — and to the detail the correspondences can be identified, it’s astonishing when one studies these things in depth, the degree to which the agreements go between totally separated cultures.

BILL MOYERS: Which says something about the commonality of the species, doesn’t it?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, yes, that was Carl Jung’s idea, which he calls the archetypes, archetypes of the collective unconscious.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by archetypes?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: An archetype is a constant form, a basic fundamental form which appears in the works of that person over there, and this person over here, without connecting them. They are expressions of the structure of the human psyche.

BILL MOYERS: So if you find in a variety of cultures, each one telling the story of creation or the story of a virgin birth or the story of a savior who comes and dies and is resurrected, you’re saying something about what is inside us and the need to understand.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right. One can say that the images of myth are reflections of spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us. And that through contemplating those, we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves. There was a very important anthropologist — he’s the one with whom my works begin, you might say, my studies — Bastian in Germany, end of the last century and first part of this. He was a world traveler and recognized very soon that there were certain motifs that appeared in all of the religions and all of the mythologies of the world. Such an idea, for example, as a spiritual power, that’s an archetypal image that appears everywhere. And he called these “elementary ideas.” But they appear in very different forms and different provinces and at different times, and those different forms are costumes he called ethnic or folk ideas. But within the ethnic idea is the elementary idea, and it is those elementary ideas that Carl Jung then began studying and called “archetypes of the unconscious.” When you say elementary idea, they seem to come from up here. When you say archetypes of the unconscious, they come from up here, and they appear in our dreams, as well as in myths.

BILL MOYERS: So when one scripture talked about being made in his image, in God’s image, it’s being, it’s being created with certain qualities that every human being possesses, no matter what that person’s religion or culture or geography or heritage.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: God would be the ultimate elementary idea of man.

BILL MOYERS: The primal need.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And we are all made in the image of God, okay? So that is the ultimate elementary idea or archetype of man.

BILL MOYERS: I feel stronger in my own faith, knowing that others had the same yearnings and were seeking for the same images to try to express an experience that couldn’t be costumed in ordinary human language.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right.

BILL MOYERS: I feel much more kinship with all those who follow other ways, because it seems…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: This is why clowns are good.

BILL MOYERS: Clowns?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Clown religions, because they show that the image is not a fact, but it’s a reflex of some kind.

BILL MOYERS: So does this help explain the trickster gods that show up at times?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They’re very much that, yes. Some of the best trickster stories are associated with our American Indian tales. Now, these figures are clownlike figures, and yet they are the creator god at the same time, very often. And this makes the point, I am not the ultimate image. I am transparent to something. Through me, through my funny form, and mocking it, and turning it into a grotesque action, you really get the sense which, if I had been a big sober presence, you get stuck with the image.

BILL MOYERS: There’s a wonderful story in some African tradition of the god who’s walking down the road, and the god has on a hat that is colored red on one side and blue on the other side. So when the people, the farmers in the field go into the village in the evening, they said, “Did you see that fellow, that god with the blue hat?” And the others said, “No, no, he had a red hat on,” and they get into a fight.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. He even makes it worse by first walking along this direction, and then turning around and turning his hat around, so that again, it’ll be red and black or whatever and then when these two chaps fight and are brought before the king or chief for judgment, this fellow appears and he says, “It’s my fault, I did it. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.”

BILL MOYERS: And there’s a truth in that…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: There sure is, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Which is?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No matter what system of thought you have, it can’t possibly include boundless life. And when you think everything is just that way, the trickster comes in and it all blows, and you get the becoming thing again. Now, Jung has a wonderful saying somewhere that, “Religion is a defense against a religious experience.”

BILL MOYERS: Well, you have to explain that.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that means it has reduced the whole thing to concepts and ideas, and having the concept and idea short-circuits the transcendent experience. The experience of deep mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience.

BILL MOYERS: Well, there are many Christians who believe that to find out who Jesus is, you have to go past the Christian faith, past the Christian doctrine, past the Christian church. And I know that’s heresy to a lot of people, but…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you have to go past the image of Jesus. The image of God becomes the final obstruction. Your God is your ultimate barrier. This is basic Hinduism, basic Buddhism. You know, the idea of the ascent of the spirit through the centers, the chakras, as they call them, or lotuses, the different centers of experience. The animal experiences of hunger and greed or just the zeal of reproduction or the physical mastery of one kind or another, these are all stages of power. But then when the center of the heart is reached, and the sense of compassion on another person, mercy and participation, and I and you are in some sense of the same being this is what marriage is based on there’s a whole new stage of life experience opens up with the opening of the heart.

And this is what’s called the virgin birth, actually, the birth of a spiritual life in what formerly was simply a human animal, living for the animal aims of health, progeny, wealth and a little fun. But now you come to something else: to participate in this sense of accord with another, or accord with some principle that has lodged in your mind as a good to be identified with, then a whole new life comes. And this is in Oriental thinking, the awakening of the religious experience.

And then this can go on even to the quest for the experience of the ultimate mystery, that is, the ultimate mystery can be experienced in two senses, one without form and the other with form. And in this Oriental thinking, you experience God with form here, this is heaven, that’s the identification with your own being, because that which God refers to is the ultimate mystery of being, which is the mystery of your being as well as of the world, so it’s…this is it.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain what the psychologist Maslow calls “peak experiences,” and what your friend James Joyce called epiphanies. I love that word, epiphany.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, well, they’re not quite the same, but…

BILL MOYERS: I know.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you feel that this has told you something, something has come through in your experience of your relationship to the harmony of being. It can come…my peak experiences, I mean, the ones that I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics.

BILL MOYERS: Which was the Everest of your experience.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, well…

BILL MOYERS: Which one was it, was it when you were running at Columbia?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, of course. And I ran a couple of races that were just beautiful, and the whole race, I knew I was going to win and there was no reason for me to know I was going to win, because I was touched off anchor in the relay with the first man 30 yards ahead of me, and I just knew, knew, it was a peak experience. Nobody could beat me today. That’s a kind of being in full form and really doing it. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life as competently as I ran those two races. And those consequently were the experience of really being at my full and doing perfect job. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like that, quite, that I really came up to anything quite that way.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think you, Joseph Campbell, have to…it has to be physical?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No, but it can be a peak experience there are other kinds of peak experiences, which I know were superior to those, but those are the ones that when I read Maslow and read of peak experience, I just know that those were peak experiences.

BILL MOYERS: What about James Joyce’s epiphanies?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Now, that’s another thing. This has to do with the esthetic experience. Joyce’s formula for the esthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object, that he calls pornography; nor does it move you to criticize and reject the object, that he calls didactics, social criticism in art and all that kind of thing. It is the holding the object, and he says you put a frame around it and see it as one thing, and then seeing it as one thing, you become aware of the relationship of part to part, the part to the whole and the whole to each of the parts. This is the essential esthetic factor rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythmic relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, there is a radiance. That’s the epiphany. And that is what would be the Christ coming through, do you understand what I’m saying?

BILL MOYERS: The face of the saint beholding God.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And it doesn’t matter who it is. I mean, you could take someone who you would think of as being a monster, that is an ethical judgment on the life, and this is transcendent of ethics, no didactics.

BILL MOYERS: But see, that’s where I would disagree with you, because it seems to me in order to experience the epiphany, that which you behold but do not want to possess must be beautiful in some way. A moment ago, when you talked about your peak experience, running, you said it was beautiful. Beautiful is an esthetic word.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, that’s right.

BILL MOYERS: And how can you behold a monster?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I tell you, there’s another emotion associated with art which is not of the beautiful, but of the sublime. And what we call monsters can be seen as sublime. And they represent powers too great for the mere forms of life to survive. Prodigious expanse of space is sublime. This is a thing that the Buddhists know how to achieve in their temples. Particularly when I was in Kyoto, I was there for seven glorious months.

BILL MOYERS: In Japan.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, visiting some of the temple gardens. They are so designed that you’re experiencing something here, and then you break past a screen and a whole new horizon opens out. And somehow with the diminishment of your own ego, the consciousness expands. This is the experience of the sublime. Another experience of the sublime is not of tremendous space, but of tremendous energy and power. And I have known a couple of people who were in central Europe during the saturation bombings that were conducted over those cities, and there was the…you just have the experience of the sublime there.

BILL MOYERS: I once interviewed a veteran of the Second World War, and I was talking to him about his experience at the Battle of the Bulge, with the assault of the Germans about to succeed. And I said, “Well, as you look back on it, what was it?” And he said, “It was sublime.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And so the monster comes through there.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by monster?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, by a monster I mean someone who breaks all of your standards for harmony and for ethical conduct.

BILL MOYERS: Is there a story in mythology that illustrates the sublime in the monster?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the god of the end of the world, Vishnu, at the end of the world is a monster. I mean, good night, he’s destroying the world, first with fire and then with a torrential flood that drowns out the fire and everything else and nothing’s left but ash, the whole universe has been wiped out. That’s God.

BILL MOYERS: Well, the Christian millennialists talk of the rapture.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, read Chapter 13 in Mark.

BILL MOYERS: Which says?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the end of the world. You see, these are experiences that go past ethical judgments. Ethics is wiped out. Our religions, with the accent on the human, as I mentioned a little while ago, also stress the ethical. God is good. God is horrific the end of the world? There’s an Arab saying that I read somewhere in The Arabian Nights that the angel of death, when the angel of death comes it is terrible; when he has reached you, it is bliss.

Now, in the Buddhist systems, particularly as we get them from Tibet, the Buddhas appear in two aspects; there is the peaceful aspect and there is the wrathful aspect of the deity. Now, if you’re clinging to your ego and its little world and hanging on, and the deity wants to open you, the wrathful aspect comes. It seems to you terrible. But if you are open, and open enough, then that same deity would be experienced as bliss.

BILL MOYERS: Well, Jesus talked of bringing a sword, and I don’t believe he meant that in terms of using it against your fellow [man], but he meant it in terms of opening the ego, I came to cut you free from the blinding ego of your own self-centeredness.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: This is what’s known in Sanskrit as Viveka, discrimination, and there is a Buddha figure called Manjushri, who will be…who’s shown with a flaming sword over his head.

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And what is the sword for? It’s to distinguish the merely temporal from the eternal. It’s the sword that distinguishes that which is enduring from that which is merely passing. The tick-tick-tick of time shuts out eternity, and we live in the field of time. But what is living in the field of time is an eternal principle that’s inflected this way.

BILL MOYERS: What’s the eternal principle?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Brahman.

BILL MOYERS: Which is?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we call it God, but that personifies it, do you see. That’s…

BILL MOYERS: It is the experience of eternity.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: The experience of the eternal.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: As what you are.

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I would say, that’s…

BILL MOYERS: That whatever eternity is, is here right now.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And nowhere else, or everywhere else. If you don’t experience it now, you’re never going to get it. Because when you get to heaven, that’s not eternal, that’s just everlasting. Heaven lasts a long time; it’s not eternal, it’s everlasting.

BILL MOYERS: I don’t follow that, now.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The eternal is beyond time; the concept of time shuts out eternity.

BILL MOYERS: Time is our invention.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Our experience, yeah. But the ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond human experience, it becomes inflected. As they say, there is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man, and that is what looks like God.

BILL MOYERS: So whatever it is we experience, we have to express in language that is just not up to the occasion.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s it.

BILL MOYERS: It’s inadequate.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated, it doesn’t shut you off, it opens, it’s the rhythm, the precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the word, is what has to happen. And then you get what Joyce calls the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of the essence, what Aquinas called the quidditas, the whatness. The whatness is the Brahman.

BILL MOYERS: Why do you think it is there is in so many people this deep yearning to live forever, to secure my place in heaven?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: When you realize what heaven is, I mean, in the works of such persons as Thomas Aquinas, it is the beholding of the beatific image of God, which is a timeless moment, you know, time explodes. So again, eternity is not something everlasting, and you can have it right here now in your relationships. I’ve lost a lot of friends, and my parents and all, and a realization that has come to me very, very keenly is that I haven’t lost them, that that moment when I was with them had an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me is still with me. And there’s a kind of intimation of immortality in that. Do you see what I mean?

Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s; he says, “When you reach a certain age,” and he wrote this when he was in his 60s or so, “and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order. It seems to have had been composed by someone. And those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.” So he says, “Who composed this plot?” And he said, “And just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you.” Then he says, “Just as those people whom you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony,” he says, “everything influencing and structuring everything else.” And he said, “It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will in nature.”

That’s a beautiful idea. It’s an idea that occurs in India, in the image of what’s called the “Nee of Indra” or the net of gems. Where it’s a net of gems where every gem reflects all the other ones. And they also have the idea of a spontaneous and simultaneous arising. Everything arises in relation to everything else, and so you can’t blame anybody for anything; it’s all working around. It’s a marvelous idea. It’s as though there were an intention behind it, and yet it all is by chance. None of us has lived the life that he intended.

BILL MOYERS: And yet we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you believe that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I don’t believe life has a real purpose. I mean, when you really see what life is, it’s a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.

BILL MOYERS: 

Not true. That’s, not true, you…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, now, wait a minute. 

Just sheer life can’t be said to have a purpose, 

because look at all the different purposes it has all over the lot. 

But each incarnation, you might say, has the potentiality and the function of life is to live that potentiality. 

Well, how do you do it? 

Well, again when my students would ask, you know, should I do this, 

should I do that? 

Dad says I should do this, 

and my answer is, 

Follow Your Bliss. 

There’s something inside you that knows you’re in the center, 

that knows you’re on the beam, 

that knows you’re off the beam. 

And if you get off the beam 

to earn money, 

you’ve lost your life.

BILL MOYERS: 

So it is not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Yes. There is a wonderful old man, 

I think he’s, still alive, 

in Germany, the Graf Karlfried, 

Karlfried Graf Durckheim. 

And he says, 

“When you’re on a journey 

and the end keeps getting further 

and further away, 

then you’ve realized that 

the real end is the journey.” 

That’s not bad. This is it, 

this moment now 

is the heavenly moment, and…

BILL MOYERS: 

I like the idea that 

Eden was not: 

Eden will be.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Eden is. 

“The Kingdom of The Father 

is spread upon The Earth, 

and Men do not see it” 

I mean, Eden is.

BILL MOYERS: 

There’s some image of Shiva, the god Shiva surrounded by circles of flames, rings of fire.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s the dance of the world, the dancer whose dance is the universe. And in this hand he has a little drum that goes tick-tick-tick. That is the drum of lime. The tick of time, which shuts out eternity, and we are enclosed in that. 

In this hand there is a flame, which burns away the veil of time and opens us up to eternity. 

And in his hair is a skull and a new moon, the death and rebirth 

at the same moment, 

the moment of becoming.

BILL MOYERS: 

That’s a powerful image for any life, not just…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, the goal of your quest for yourself is to find that burning point in your point, that becoming thing in yourself, which is fearless and desireless, but just becoming. This is the condition of warrior going into battle with perfect courage. That’s life in movement. A plant growing, I think of grass, you know. Every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawn mower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use? It’s the coming into being that’s it, and that’s the life point in you, and that’s what these myths are concerned to communicate to you.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I’ve always interpreted that powerful, mysterious statement, “The Word was made flesh,” as the eternal principle finding itself in the human journey, the human experience.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Now, I don’t know what the Word is, and I don’t even know what flesh is, but I know that there is that experience of epiphany, when you meet what you don’t know and understand it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, and you can find it in yourself, too, the Word in yourself.

BILL MOYERS: Where do you find it, if you don’t find it in yourself?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, right. Goethe says, “All things are metaphors.” Alles vergangliche ist nur ein gleiches.” Everything that’s transitory is but a metaphorical reference. That’s what we all are, and to see the Word, getting back to that, your radiance that we spoke of before comes out here again now.

BILL MOYERS: But how does one worship a metaphor, love a metaphor, die for a metaphor?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s what people are doing all over the place. That’s what people are doing all over the place, dying for metaphors. And when you really realize the sound Aum, the sound of the mystery of the Word everywhere, then you don’t have to go out and die for anything, because it’s right there all around, and just sit still and see it and experience it and know it.

BILL MOYERS: Explain “Aum.” That’s the first time you’ve used that.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, “Aum” is a word that, what can I say, represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe, of which all things are manifestations. And “Aum”, it’s a wonderful word, it’s written A-U-M. You start in the back of the mouth, Ah, and then, Ooh, you fill the mouth, and M-m-m, closes it, the mouth. And when you have pronounced this properly, all vowel sounds are in that pronunciation: “Aum”. And consonants are regarded simply as interruptions of “Aum”, and all words are thus fragments of “Aum”, as all images are fragments of the form of forms, of which all things are just reflections. And so “Aum” is a symbol, a symbolic sound, that puts you in touch with that throbbing being that is the universe.

And when you hear some of these Tibetan monks 

that are over here from the Rgyud Stod monastery outside of Lhasa, 

when they sing the “Aum,” you know what it means, all right .

That’s the zoom of being in the world. 

And to be in touch with that 

and to get the sense of that, 

that is the peak experience of all. 

“Ab-ooh-mm.” 

The birth, the coming into being, 

and the solution to the cycle of that. And it’s just called the four-element syllable. What is the fourth element? “Ah-ooh-mm,” and the silence out of which it comes, back into which it goes, and which underlies it.

Now, my life is the “Ah-ooh-mm,” but there is a silence that underlies it, and that is what we would call the immortal. 

This is the mortal, and that’s 

the immortal, and there wouldn’t be this 

if there weren’t that.

BILL MOYERS: 

The meaning is essentially wordless.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Yes. Well, words are always qualifications and limitations.

BILL MOYERS: 

And yet, Joe, all we puny human beings are left with is this miserable language, beautiful though it is, that falls short of trying to describe…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s right And that’s why it’s a peak experience to break past all that every now and then, to realize “oh, ah,” I think so.

Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic

Chapter 3. Sympathetic Magic.

Section 2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic.

PERHAPS the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few instances out of many may be given to prove at once the wide diffusion of the practice over the world and its remarkable persistence through the ages. For thousands of years ago it was known to the sorcerers of ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome, and at this day it is still resorted to by cunning and malignant savages in Australia, Africa, and Scotland. Thus the North American Indians, we are told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented. For example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain magic words as he does so. The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul.   1

  A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows. Take parings of nails, hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim, enough to represent every part of his person, and then make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say:

“It is not wax that I am scorching,

It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch.” 

After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die. This charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic and contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him, namely, his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay charm, which resembles the Ojebway practice still more closely, is to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees’ comb and of the length of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the head, and his head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards; enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that his blood may not be on your head, you should say:

“It is not I who am burying him,

It is Gabriel who is burying him.” 

Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than you are.   2

  If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would suckle it. Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the woman’s head, saying, “O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and on my lap.” Then he asks the woman, “Has the child come?” and she answers, “Yes, it is sucking already.” After that the man holds the fowl on the husband’s head, and mumbles some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here the pretence that a child has been born is a purely magical rite designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with and reinforced by religion.   3

  Among some of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain the same end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a large stone attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapt round his body represents the child in the womb, and, following the directions shouted to him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born.   4

  The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption, and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded man who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of primitive law and philosophy, that boy or man is really your son to all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imitation of a real birth; and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practised by the barbarians. At the present time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the whole property of his adoptive parents. Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grownup man or woman, a great many people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front he is stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm and tied to a woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against a real child. In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman’s lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.   5

  Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness. The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate ceremony, based on homoeopathic magic, for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the patient a healthy red colour from a living, vigorous source, namely, a red bull. With this intention, a priest recited the following spell: “Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy jaundice: in the colour of the red bull do we envelop thee! We envelop thee in red tints, unto long life. May this person go unscathed and be free of yellow colour! The cows whose divinity is Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves red (rohinih)—in their every form and every strength we do envelop thee. Into the parrots, into the thrush, do we put thy jaundice, and, furthermore, into the yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice.” While he uttered these words, the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of health into the sallow patient, gave him water to sip which was mixed with the hair of a red bull; he poured water over the animal’s back and made the sick man drink it; he seated him on the skin of a red bull and tied a piece of the skin to him. Then in order to improve his colour by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of tumeric or curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three yellow birds, to wit, a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water over the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with it no doubt the jaundice, from him to the birds. After that, by way of giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapt them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient’s skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. “Such is the nature,” says Plutarch, “and such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eyesight.” So well recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable property of the stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds for sale they kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay not in its colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same, bird, to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.   6

  One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables the cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of on that of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience, while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before him. For example, the peasants of Perche, in France, labour under the impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about by the patient’s stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the organ to its proper place. After hearing the symptoms he at once throws himself into the most horrible contortions, for the purpose of unhooking his own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again in another series of contortions and grimaces, while the patient experiences a corresponding relief. Fee five francs. In like manner a Dyak medicine-man, who has been fetched in a case of illness, will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken out of the house, and deposited on the ground. After about an hour the other medicine-men loose the pretended dead man and bring him to life; and as he recovers, the sick person is supposed to recover too. A cure for a tumour, based on the principle of homoeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his curious work on medicine. It is as follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across, and hang one end of it round the patient’s neck, and the other in the smoke of the fire. As the vervain dries up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall from your body; only you must be very careful not to wipe them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it.   7

  Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a great part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to secure an abundant supply of food. On the principle that like produces like, many things are done by him and his friends in deliberate imitation of the result which he seeks to attain; and, on the other hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because they bear some more or less fanciful resemblance to others which would really be disastrous.   8

  Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically carried into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than in the barren regions of Central Australia. Here the tribes are divided into a number of totem clans, each of which is charged with the duty of multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of magical ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible animals and plants, and the general result supposed to be accomplished by these ceremonies is that of supplying the tribe with food and other necessaries. Often the rites consist of an imitation of the effect which the people desire to produce; in other words, their magic is homoeopathic or imitative. Thus among the Warramunga the headman of the white cockatoo totem seeks to multiply white cockatoos by holding an effigy of the bird and mimicking its harsh cry. Among the Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem perform ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the other members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime representing the fully-developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is set up to imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a number of men, who have the grub for their totem, sit and sing of the creature in its various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as they do so they sing of the insect emerging from the chrysalis. This is supposed to multiply the numbers of the grubs. Again, in order to multiply emus, which are an important article of food, the men of the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem, especially the parts of the emu which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers, wearing head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions.   9

  The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once. The islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence they hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In the island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for it, the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen leaves, in the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall into the pit, just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. In the East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and Noessa Laut, when a fisherman is about to set a trap for fish in the sea, he looks out for a tree, of which the fruit has been much pecked at by birds. From such a tree he cuts a stout branch and makes of it the principal post in his fish-trap; for he believes that, just as the tree lured many birds to its fruit, so the branch cut from that tree will lure many fish to the trap.   10

  The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which haunts coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into which the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head stick fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a man’s skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set his nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off, then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be caught in it, and cries, “Hillo! what’s this? I’m afraid I’m caught.” After that the net is sure to catch game. A pantomime of the same sort has been acted within the living memory in our Scottish Highlands. The Rev. James Macdonald, now of Reay in Caithness, tells us that in his boyhood when he was fishing with companions about Loch Aline and they had had no bites for a long time, they used to make a pretence of throwing one of their fellows overboard and hauling him out of the water, as if he were a fish; after that the trout or silloch would begin to nibble, according as the boat was on fresh or salt water. Before a Carrier Indian goes out to snare martens, he sleeps by himself for about ten nights beside the fire with a little stick pressed down on his neck. This naturally causes the fall-stick of his trap to drop down on the neck of the marten. Among the Galelareese, who inhabit a district in the northern part of Halmahera, a large island to the west of New Guinea, it is a maxim that when you are loading your gun to go out shooting, you should always put the bullet in your mouth before you insert it in the gun; for by so doing you practically eat the game that is to be hit by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly miss the mark. A Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles, and is awaiting results, is careful in eating his curry always to begin by swallowing three lumps of rice successively; for this helps the bait to slide more easily down the crocodile’s throat. He is equally scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry; for, if he did, it seems clear that the sharp-pointed stick on which the bait is skewered would similarly work itself loose, and the crocodile would get off with the bait. Hence in these circumstances it is prudent for the hunter, before he begins his meal, to get somebody else to take the bones out of his curry, otherwise he may at any moment have to choose between swallowing a bone and losing the crocodile.   11

  This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter abstains from doing lest, on the principle that like produces like, they should spoil his luck. For it is to be observed that the system of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive precepts; it comprises a very large number of negative precepts, that is, prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the negative precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or at all events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws of similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He thinks that if he acts in a certain way, certain consequences will inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws; and if the consequences of a particular act appear to him likely to prove disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in that way lest he should incur them. In other words, he abstains from doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of cause and effect, he falsely believes would injure him; in short, he subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative application of practical magic. Positive magic or sorcery says, “Do this in order that so and so may happen.” Negative magic or taboo says, “Do not do this, lest so and so should happen.” The aim of positive magic or sorcery is to produce a desired event; the aim of negative magic or taboo is to avoid an undesirable one. But both consequences, the desirable and the undesirable, are supposed to be brought about in accordance with the laws of similarity and contact. And just as the desired consequence is not really effected by the observance of a magical ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does not really result from the violation of a taboo. If the supposed evil necessarily followed a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be a taboo but a precept of morality or common sense. It is not a taboo to say, “Do not put your hand in the fire”; it is a rule of common sense, because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary evil. In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in tabular form:   12

  I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wished to show that they fall under the head of Sympathetic Magic, being only particular applications of that general theory. Thus, among the Esquimaux boys are forbidden to play cat’s cradle, because if they did so their fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoon-line. Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity, which is the basis of homoeopathic magic: as the child’s fingers are entangled by the string in playing cat’s cradle, so they will be entangled by the harpoonline when he is a man and hunts whales. Again, among the Huzuls of the Carpathian Mountains the wife of a hunter may not spin while her husband is eating, or the game will turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable to hit it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of similarity. So, too, in most parts of ancient Italy women were forbidden by law to spin on the highroads as they walked, or even to carry their spindles openly, because any such action was believed to injure the crops. Probably the notion was that the twirling of the spindle would twirl the corn-stalks and prevent them from growing straight. So, too, among the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery, because they think that if she did so the child’s guts might be entangled like the thread. For a like reason in Bilaspore, a district of India, when the chief men of a village meet in council, no one present should twirl a spindle; for they think that if such a thing were to happen, the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a circle and never be wound up. In some of the East Indian islands any one who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in like manner stop in front of the hunter’s snares and then turn back, instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason it is a rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no one may stand or loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant woman, for such delay would retard the birth of the child; and in various parts of Sumatra the woman herself in these circumstances is forbidden to stand at the door or on the top rung of the house-ladder under pain of suffering hard labour for her imprudence in neglecting so elementary a precaution. Malays engaged in the search for camphor eat their food dry and take care not to pound their salt fine. The reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor tree. Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if, while seeking for camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor would be found also in fine grains; whereas by eating his salt coarse he ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large. Camphor hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheath of the leaf-stalk of the Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the whole of the expedition they will never wash the plate, for fear that the camphor might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of the tree. Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be to wash out the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are imbedded. The chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of Siam, is lac. This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young branches of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand. All who engage in the business of gathering the gum abstain from washing themselves and especially from cleansing their heads, lest by removing the parasites from their hair they should detach the other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not eat rosebuds on any account; for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach would make the bird itch, with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would merely sit and scratch himself. Following this train of thought the eagle hunter also refrains from using an awl when he is looking after his snares; for surely if he were to scratch with an awl, the eagles would scratch him. The same disastrous consequence would follow if his wives and children at home used an awl while he is out after eagles, and accordingly they are forbidden to handle the tool in his absence for fear of putting him in bodily danger.   13

  Among the taboos observed by savages none perhaps are more numerous or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods, and of such prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law of similarity and are accordingly examples of negative magic. Just as the savage eats many animals or plants in order to acquire certain desirable qualities with which he believes them to be endowed, so he avoids eating many other animals and plants lest he should acquire certain undesirable qualities with which he believes them to be infected. In eating the former he practises positive magic; in abstaining from the latter he practises negative magic. Many examples of such positive magic will meet us later on; here I will give a few instances of such negative magic or taboo. For example, in Madagascar soldiers are forbidden to eat a number of foods lest on the principle of homoeopathic magic they should be tainted by certain dangerous or undesirable properties which are supposed to inhere in these particular viands. Thus they may not taste hedgehog, “as it is feared that this animal, from its propensity of coiling up into a ball when alarmed, will impart a timid shrinking disposition to those who partake of it.” Again, no soldier should eat an ox’s knee, lest like an ox he should become weak in the knees and unable to march. Further, the warrior should be careful to avoid partaking of a cock that has died fighting or anything that has been speared to death; and no male animal may on any account be killed in his house while he is away at the wars. For it seems obvious that if he were to eat a cock that had died fighting, he would himself be slain on the field of battle; if he were to partake of an animal that had been speared, he would be speared himself; if a male animal were killed in his house during his absence, he would himself be killed in like manner and perhaps at the same instant. Further, the Malagasy soldier must eschew kidneys, because in the Malagasy language the word for kidney is the same as that for “shot”; so shot he would certainly be if he ate a kidney.   14

  The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing examples of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at considerable distances; thus among the Blackfeet Indians the wives and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an awl during his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and father; and again no male animal may be killed in the house of a Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have no difficulty in convincing a savage; the savage believed in it long ago, and what is more, he acted on his belief with a logical consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has not yet, so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the savage is convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons and things afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may do so too. Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones. In particular when a party of men are out hunting or fighting, their kinsfolk at home are often expected to do certain things or to abstain from doing certain others, for the sake of ensuring the safety and success of the distant hunters or warriors. I will now give some instances of this magical telepathy both in its positive and in its negative aspect.   15

  In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase, he warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip through them. When a Dyak village has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be “butter-fingered” and the prey would slip through their hands.   16

  Elephant-hunters in East Africa believe that, if their wives prove unfaithful in their absence, this gives the elephant power over his pursuer, who will accordingly be killed or severely wounded. Hence if a hunter hears of his wife’s misconduct, he abandons the chase and returns home. If a Wagogo hunter is unsuccessful, or is attacked by a lion, he attributes it to his wife’s misbehaviour at home, and returns to her in great wrath. While he is away hunting, she may not let any one pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits; and she must lie on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of Bolivia thought that if a hunter’s wife was unfaithful to him in his absence he would be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an accident happened to him, it was sure to entail the punishment, and often the death, of the woman, whether she was innocent or guilty. An Aleutian hunter of sea-otters thinks that he cannot kill a single animal if during his absence from home his wife should be unfaithful or his sister unchaste.   17

  The Huichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demi-god a species of cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose. Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their absent husbands by never walking fast, much less running, while the men are on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits which, in the shape of rain, good crops, and so forth, are expected to flow from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands. During the whole of the time which elapses till the festival of the cactus is held, neither party washes except on certain occasions, and then only with water brought from the distant country where the holy plant grows. They also fast much, eat no salt, and are bound to strict continence. Any one who breaks this law is punished with illness, and, moreover, jeopardises the result which all are striving for. Health, luck, and life are to be gained by gathering the cactus, the gourd of the God of Fire; but inasmuch as the pure fire cannot benefit the impure, men and women must not only remain chaste for the time being, but must also purge themselves from the taint of past sin. Hence four days after the men have started the women gather and confess to Grandfather Fire with what men they have been in love from childhood till now. They may not omit a single one, for if they did so the men would not find a single cactus. So to refresh their memories each one prepares a string with as many knots as she has had lovers. This she brings to the temple, and, standing before the fire, she mentions aloud all the men she has scored on her string, name after name. Having ended her confession, she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in peace. From now on the women are averse even to letting men pass near them. The cactus-seekers themselves make in like manner a clean breast of all their frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot on a string, and after they have “talked to all the five winds” they deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader, who burns it in the fire.   18

  Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded that were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are searching for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the men would evaporate. Husbands can discover, by certain knots in the tree, when the wives are unfaithful; and it is said that in former days many women were killed by jealous husbands on no better evidence than that of these knots. Further, the wives dare not touch a comb while their husbands are away collecting the camphor; for if they did so, the interstices between the fibres of the tree, instead of being filled with the precious crystals, would be empty like the spaces between the teeth of a comb. In the Kei Islands, to the southwest of New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to sail for a distant port has been launched, the part of the beach on which it lay is covered as speedily as possible with palm branches, and becomes sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the ship comes home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to perish. Moreover, all the time that the voyage lasts three or four young girls, specially chosen for the duty, are supposed to remain in sympathetic connexion with the mariners and to contribute by their behaviour to the safety and success of the voyage. On no account, except for the most necessary purpose, may they quit the room that has been assigned to them. More than that, so long as the vessel is believed to be at sea they must remain absolutely motionless, crouched on their mats with their hands clasped between their knees. They may not turn their heads to the left or to the right or make any other movement whatsoever. If they did, it would cause the boat to pitch and toss; and they may not eat any sticky stuff, such as rice boiled in coco-nut milk, for the stickiness of the food would clog the passage of the boat through the water. When the sailors are supposed to have reached their destination, the strictness of these rules is somewhat relaxed; but during the whole time that the voyage lasts the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have sharp bones or stings, such as the sting-ray, lest their friends at sea should be involved in sharp, stinging trouble.   19

  Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connexion between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who may at any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus in some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning, lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy. Among the Sea Dyaks of Banting in Sarawak the women strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are away fighting. Some of the rules are negative and some are positive, but all alike are based on the principles of magical homoeopathy and telepathy. Amongst them are the following. The women must wake very early in the morning and open the windows as soon as it is light; otherwise their absent husbands will oversleep themselves. The women may not oil their hair, or the men will slip. The women may neither sleep nor doze by day, or the men will be drowsy on the march. The women must cook and scatter popcorn on the verandah every morning; so will the men be agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls; for if any one were to stumble over them, the absent husbands would fall and be at the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in the pot and put aside; so will the men far away always have something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the women sit at the loom till their legs grow cramped, otherwise their husbands will likewise be stiff in their joints and unable to rise up quickly or to run away from the foe. So in order to keep their husbands’ joints supple the women often vary their labours at the loom by walking up and down the verandah. Further, they may not cover up their faces, or the men would not to be able to find their way through the tall grass or jungle. Again, the women may not sew with a needle, or the men will tread on the sharp spikes set by the enemy in the path. Should a wife prove unfaithful while her husband is away, he will lose his life in the enemy’s country. Some years ago all these rules and more were observed by the women of Banting, while their husbands were fighting for the English against rebels. But alas! these tender precautions availed them little; for many a man, whose faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home, found a soldier’s grave.   20

  In the island of Timor, while war is being waged, the high-priest never quits the temple; his food is brought to him or cooked inside; day and night he must keep the fire burning, for if he were to let it die out, disaster would be fall the warriors and would continue so long as the hearth was cold. Moreover, he must drink only hot water during the time the army is absent; for every draught of cold water would damp the spirits of the people, so that they could not vanquish the enemy. In the Kei Islands, when the warriors have departed, the women return indoors and bring out certain baskets containing fruits and stones. These fruits and stones they anoint and place on a board, murmuring as they do so, “O lord sun, moon, let the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, betrothed, and other relations, just as raindrops rebound from these objects which are smeared with oil.” As soon as the first shot is heard, the baskets are put aside, and the women, seizing their fans, rush out of the houses. Then, waving their fans in the direction of the enemy, they run through the village, while they sing, “O golden fans! let our bullets hit, and those of the enemy miss.” In this custom the ceremony of anointing stones, in order that the bullets may recoil from the men like raindrops from the stones, is a piece of pure homoeopathic or imitative magic; but the prayer to the sun, that he will be pleased to give effect to the charm, is a religious and perhaps later addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a charm to direct the bullets towards or away from their mark, according as they are discharged from the guns of friends or foes.   21

  An old historian of Madagascar informs us that “while the men are at the wars, and until their return, the women and girls cease not day and night to dance, and neither lie down nor take food in their own houses. And although they are very voluptuously inclined, they would not for anything in the world have an intrigue with another man while their husband is at the war, believing firmly that if that happened, their husband would be either killed or wounded. They believe that by dancing they impart strength, courage, and good fortune to their husbands; accordingly during such times they give themselves no rest, and this custom they observe very religiously.”   22

  Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast the wives of men who are away with the army paint themselves white, and adorn their persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is expected to take place, they run about armed with guns, or sticks carved to look like guns, and taking green paw-paws (fruits shaped somewhat like a melon), they hack them with knives, as if they were chopping off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely an imitative charm, to enable the men to do to the enemy as the women do to the paw-paws. In the West African town of Framin, while the Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott saw a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they danced they sang, “Our husbands have gone to Ashanteeland; may they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth!”   23

  Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men were on the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent intervals. These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition. The dancers flourished their knives, threw long sharp-pointed sticks forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the enemy’s country. They painted their faces red and sang as they danced, and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands and help them to kill many foes. Some had eagle-down stuck on the points of their sticks. When the dance was over, these weapons were hidden. If a woman whose husband was at the war thought she saw hair or a piece of a scalp on the weapon when she took it out, she knew that her husband had killed an enemy. But if she saw a stain of blood on it, she knew he was wounded or dead. When the men of the Yuki tribe in California were away fighting, the women at home did not sleep; they danced continually in a circle, chanting and waving leafy wands. For they said that if they danced all the time, their husbands would not grow tired. Among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, when the men had gone to war, the women at home would get up very early in the morning and pretend to make war by falling upon their children and feigning to take them for slaves. This was supposed to help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a wife were unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the war-path, he would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women at home lay with their heads towards the point of the compass to which the war-canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about, for the warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At Masset the Haida women danced and sang war-songs all the time their husbands were away at the wars, and they had to keep everything about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might kill her husband by not observing these customs. When a band of Carib Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the war-path, their friends left in the village used to calculate as nearly as they could the exact moment when the absent warriors would be advancing to attack the enemy. Then they took two lads, laid them down on a bench, and inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs. This the youths submitted to without a murmur, supported in their sufferings by the firm conviction, in which they had been bred from childhood, that on the constancy and fortitude with which they bore the cruel ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades in the battle.   24

  Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, is that of causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a festival was held in honour of the goddess of maize, or “the long-haired mother,” as she was called. It began at the time “when the plant had attained its full growth, and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this festival the women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial, in order that the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain might be correspondingly large and flat, and that the people might have abundance.” In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in the air are approved homoeopathic modes of making the crops grow high. Thus in Franche-Comté they say that you should dance at the Carnival in order to make the hemp grow tall.   25

  The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically by his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Malay woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to make the rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding thick-husked rice. Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she wore the less husk there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband’s garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts, the men answered, “Father, you don’t understand these things, and that is why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them sow, then; we men don’t know as much about it as they do.”   26

  Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren. Hence this belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the earth with their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground; and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from that graft will let its fruit fall untimely. When the Chams of Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no shower should fall, they eat their rice dry in order to prevent rain from spoiling the crop.   27

  In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with qualities or accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from his own. But on the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence is mutual: the plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the catgut plant are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in the furrow. Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction of the roots to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players wash themselves with it to toughen their muscles. It is a Galelareese belief that if you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground, you will yourself contract a disposition to stumble and fall; and that if you partake of something which has been forgotten (such as a sweet potato left in the pot or a banana in the fire), you will become forgetful. The Galelareese are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two bananas growing from a single head she would give birth to twins. The Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would become a mother of twins if she ate a double grain of millet. In Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm by which a banished prince might be restored to his kingdom. He had to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown out of the stump of a tree which had been cut down. The recuperative power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated through the fire to the food, and so to the prince, who ate the food which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew out of the tree. The Sudanese think that if a house is built of the wood of thorny trees, the life of the people who dwell in that house will likewise be thorny and full of trouble.   28

  There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear nor speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind, deaf and dumb by the use of dead men’s bones or anything else that is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among the Galelareese, when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes a little earth from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart’s house just above the place where her parents sleep. This, he fancies, will prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved, since the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as the dead. Burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this species of magic, which is very useful to them in the exercise of their profession. Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a dead man’s bone over the house, saying, with pungent sarcasm, “As this bone may waken, so may these people waken”; after that not a soul in the house can keep his or her eyes open. Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a grave and sprinkles it round the house which he intends to rob; this throws the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a Hindoo will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the house; Indians of Peru scatter the dust of dead men’s bones; and Ruthenian burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone, pour tallow into it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house with this candle burning, which causes the inmates to sleep a death-like sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone and play upon it; whereupon all persons within hearing are overcome with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent purpose the left fore-arm of a woman who had died in giving birth to her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With it they beat the ground before they entered the house which they designed to plunder; this caused every one in the house to lose all power of speech and motion; they were as dead, hearing and seeing everything, but perfectly powerless; some of them, however, really slept and even snored. In Europe similar properties were ascribed to the Hand of Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been hanged. If a candle made of the fat of a malefactor who had also died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory as in a candlestick, it rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented; they could not stir a finger any more than if they were dead. Sometimes the dead man’s hand is itself the candle, or rather bunch of candles, all its withered fingers being set on fire; but should any member of the household be awake, one of the fingers will not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with milk. Often it is prescribed that the thief’s candle should be made of the finger of a new-born or, still better, unborn child; sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too little somebody in the house will wake and catch him. Once these tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them out. In the seventeenth century robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs. An ancient Greek robber or burglar thought he could silence and put to flight the fiercest watchdogs by carrying with him a brand plucked from a funeral pyre. Again, Servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the restraints of domestic life will take the copper coins from the eyes of a corpse, wash them in wine or water, and give the liquid to their husbands to drink. After swallowing it, the husband will be as blind to his wife’s peccadilloes as the dead man was on whose eyes the coins were laid.   29

  Further, animals are often conceived to possess qualities of properties which might be useful to man, and homoeopathic or imitative magic seeks to communicate these properties to human beings in various ways. Thus some Bechuanas wear a ferret as a charm, because, being very tenacious of life, it will make them difficult to kill. Others wear a certain insect, mutilated, but living, for a similar purpose. Yet other Bechuana warriors wear the hair of a hornless ox among their own hair, and the skin of a frog on their mantle, because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no horns, is hard to catch; so the man who is provided with these charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the frog. Again, it seems plain that a South African warrior who twists tufts of rat’s hair among his own curly black locks will have just as many chances of avoiding the enemy’s spear as the nimble rat has of avoiding things thrown at it; hence in these regions rats’ hair is in great demand when war is expected. One of the ancient books of India prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory, the earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a place where a boar has been wallowing, since the strength of the boar will be in that earth. When you are playing the one-stringed lute, and your fingers are stiff, the thing to do is to catch some long-legged field spiders and roast them, and then rub your fingers with the ashes; that will make your fingers as lithe and nimble as the spiders’ legs—at least so think the Galelareese. To bring back a runaway slave an Arab will trace a magic circle on the ground, stick a nail in the middle of it, and attach a beetle by a thread to the nail, taking care that the sex of the beetle is that of the fugitive. As the beetle crawls round and round, it will coil the thread about the nail, thus shortening its tether and drawing nearer to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopathic magic the runaway slave will be drawn back to his master.   30

  Among the western tribes of British New Guinea, a man who has killed a snake will burn it and smear his legs with the ashes when he goes into the forest; for no snake will bite him for some days afterwards. If a South Slavonian has a mind to pilfer and steal at market, he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat, and then throw a pinch of its ashes over the person with whom he is higgling; after that he can take what he likes from the booth, and the owner will not be a bit the wiser, having become as blind as the deceased cat with whose ashes he has been sprinkled. The thief may even ask boldly, “Did I pay for it?” and the deluded huckster will reply, “Why, certainly.” Equally simple and effectual is the expedient adopted by natives of Central Australia who desire to cultivate their beards. They prick the chin all over with a pointed bone, and then stroke it carefully with a magic stick or stone, which represents a kind of rat that has very long whiskers. The virtue of these whiskers naturally passes into the representative stick or stone, and thence by an easy transition to the chin, which, consequently, is soon adorned with a rich growth of beard. The ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping; that to smear the eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an eagle would give him the eagle’s vision; and that a raven’s eggs would restore the blackness of the raven to silvery hair. Only the person who adopted this last mode of concealing the ravages of time had to be most careful to keep his mouth full of oil all the time he applied the eggs to his venerable locks, else his teeth as well as his hair would be dyed raven black, and no amount of scrubbing and scouring would avail to whiten them again. The hair-restorer was in fact a shade too powerful, and in applying it you might get more than you bargained for.   31

  The Huichol Indians admire the beautiful markings on the backs of serpents. Hence when a Huichol woman is about to weave or embroider, her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick, while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole length of its back; then she passes the same hand over her forehead and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the web as the markings on the back of the serpent.   32

  On the principle of homoeopathic magic, inanimate things, as well as plants and animals, may diffuse blessing or bane around them, according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the wizard to tap or dam, as the case may be, the stream of weal or woe. In Samaracand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put glue in the palm of its hand, in order that, when the child grows up, his words may be sweet and precious things may stick to his hands as if they were glued. The Greeks thought that a garment made from the fleece of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt the wearer, setting up an itch or irritation in his skin. They were also of opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were dropped in wine, it would make all who drank of that wine to fall out among themselves. Among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman often borrows the robe of a woman who has had many children, hoping with the robe to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner. The Caffres of Sofala, in East Africa, had a great dread of being struck with anything hollow, such as a reed or a straw, and greatly preferred being thrashed with a good thick cudgel or an iron bar, even though it hurt very much. For they thought that if a man were beaten with anything hollow, his inside would waste away till he died. In eastern seas there is a large shell which the Buginese of Celebes call the “old man” (kadjâwo). On Fridays they turn these “old men” upside down and place them on the thresholds of their houses, believing that whoever then steps over the threshold of the house will live to be old. At initiation a Brahman boy is made to tread with his right foot on a stone, while the words are repeated, “Tread on this stone; like a stone be firm”; and the same ceremony is performed, with the same words, by a Brahman bride at her marriage. In Madagascar a mode of counteracting the levity of fortune is to bury a stone at the foot of the heavy house-post. The common custom of swearing upon a stone may be based partly on a belief that the strength and stability of the stone lend confirmation to an oath. Thus the old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus tells us that “the ancients, when they were to choose a king, were wont to stand on stones planted in the ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to foreshadow from the steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be lasting.”   33

  But while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside in all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to particular stones, or kinds of stone, in accordance with their individual or specific qualities of shape and colour. For example, the Indians of Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize, others for the increase of potatoes, and others again for the increase of cattle. The stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the likeness of cobs of maize, and the stones destined to multiply cattle had the shape of sheep.   34

  In some parts of Melanesia a like belief prevails that certain sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond in their nature to the shape of the stone. Thus a piece of water-worn coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to a bread-fruit. Hence in the Banks Islands a man who finds such a coral will lay it at the root of one of his bread-fruit trees in the expectation that it will make the tree bear well. If the result answers his expectation, he will then, for a proper remuneration, take stones of less-marked character from other men and let them lie near his, in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which resides in it. Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring in money; and if a man found a large stone with a number of small ones under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure that to offer money upon it would bring him pigs. In these and similar cases the Melanesians ascribe the marvellous power, not to the stone itself, but to its indwelling spirit; and sometimes, as we have just seen, a man endeavours to propitiate the spirit by laying down offerings on the stone. But the conception of spirits that must be propitiated lies outside the sphere of magic, and within that of religion. Where such a conception is found, as here, in conjunction with purely magical ideas and practices, the latter may generally be assumed to be the original stock on which the religious conception has been at some later time engrafted. For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion. But to this point we shall return presently.   35

  The ancients set great store on the magical qualities of precious stones; indeed it has been maintained, with great show of reason, that such stones were used as amulets long before they were worn as mere ornaments. Thus the Greeks gave the name of tree-agate to a stone which exhibits tree-like markings, and they thought that if two of these gems were tied to the horns or necks of oxen at the plough, the crop would be sure to be plentiful. Again, they recognised a milkstone which produced an abundant supply of milk in women if only they drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milk-stones are used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at the present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to ensure an abundant flow of milk. Again, the Greeks believed in a stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named the snake-stone; to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and sprinkle the powder on the wound. The wine-coloured amethyst received its name, which means “not drunken,” because it was supposed to keep the wearer of it sober; and two brothers who desired to live at unity were advised to carry magnets about with them, which, by drawing the twain together, would clearly prevent them from falling out.   36

  The ancient books of the Hindoos lay down a rule that after sunset on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife till the stars begin to twinkle in the sky. When the pole-star appears, he should point it out to her, and, addressing the star, say, “Firm art thou; I see thee, the firm one. Firm be thou with me, O thriving one!” Then, turning to his wife, he should say, “To me Brihaspati has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live with me a hundred autumns.” The intention of the ceremony is plainly to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is the wish expressed in Keats’s last sonnet:

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.   37

  Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our attention, to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man, of animals, and of plants. In the flowing tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of exuberance, of prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness, and of death. The Breton peasant fancies that clover sown when the tide is coming in will grow well, but that if the plant be sown at low water or when the tide is going out, it will never reach maturity, and that the cows which feed on it will burst. His wife believes that the best butter is made when the tide has just turned and is beginning to flow, that milk which foams in the churn will go on foaming till the hour of high water is past, and that water drawn from the well or milk extracted from the cow while the tide is rising will boil up in the pot or saucepan and overflow into the fire. According to some of the ancients, the skins of seals, even after they had been parted from their bodies, remained in secret sympathy with the sea, and were observed to ruffle when the tide was on the ebb. Another ancient belief, attributed to Aristotle, was that no creature can die except at ebb tide. The belief, if we can trust Pliny, was confirmed by experience, so far as regards human beings, on the coast of France. Philostratus also assures us that at Cadiz dying people never yielded up the ghost while the water was high. A like fancy still lingers in some parts of Europe. On the Cantabrian coast they think that persons who die of chronic or acute disease expire at the moment when the tide begins to recede. In Portugal, all along the coast of Wales, and on some parts of the coast of Brittany, a belief is said to prevail that people are born when the tide comes in, and die when it goes out. Dickens attests the existence of the same superstition in England. “People can’t die, along the coast,” said Mr. Pegotty, “except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born till flood.” The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent. Shakespeare must have been familiar with it, for he makes Falstaff die “even just between twelve and one, e’en at the turning o’ the tide.” We meet the belief again on the Pacific coast of North America among the Haidas. Whenever a good Haida is about to die he sees a canoe manned by some of his dead friends, who come with the tide to bid him welcome to the spirit land. “Come with us now,” they say, “for the tide is about to ebb and we must depart.” At Port Stephens, in New South Wales, the natives always buried their dead at flood tide, never at ebb, lest the retiring water should bear the soul of the departed to some distant country.   38

  To ensure a long life the Chinese have recourse to certain complicated charms, which concentrate in themselves the magical essence emanating, on homoeopathic principles, from times and seasons, from persons and from things. The vehicles employed to transmit these happy influences are no other than grave-clothes. These are provided by many Chinese in their lifetime, and most people have them cut out and sewn by an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that, since such a person is likely to live a great many years to come, a part of her capacity to live long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus stave off for many years the time when they shall be put to their proper use. Further, the garments are made by preference in a year which has an intercalary month; for to the Chinese mind it seems plain that grave-clothes made in a year which is unusually long will possess the capacity of prolonging life in an unusually high degree. Amongst the clothes there is one robe in particular on which special pains have been lavished to imbue it with this priceless quality. It is a long silken gown of the deepest blue colour, with the word “longevity” embroidered all over it in thread of gold. To present an aged parent with one of these costly and splendid mantles, known as “longevity garments,” is esteemed by the Chinese an act of filial piety and a delicate mark of attention. As the garment purports to prolong the life of its owner, he often wears it, especially on festive occasions, in order to allow the influence of longevity, created by the many golden letters with which it is bespangled, to work their full effect upon his person. On his birthday, above all, he hardly ever fails to don it, for in China common sense bids a man lay in a large stock of vital energy on his birthday, to be expended in the form of health and vigour during the rest of the year. Attired in the gorgeous pall, and absorbing its blessed influence at every pore, the happy owner receives complacently the congratulations of friends and relations, who warmly express their admiration of these magnificent cerements, and of the filial piety which prompted the children to bestow so beautiful and useful a present on the author of their being.   39

  Another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen in the Chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply affected by its shape, and that they must vary according to the character of the thing which that shape most nearly resembles. Thus it is related that long ago the town of Tsuen-cheu-fu, the outlines of which are like those of a carp, frequently fell a prey to the depredations of the neighbouring city of Yung-chun, which is shaped like a fishing-net, until the inhabitants of the former town conceived the plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst. These pagodas, which still tower above the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu, have ever since exercised the happiest influence over its destiny by intercepting the imaginary net before it could descend and entangle in its meshes the imaginary carp. Some forty years ago the wise men of Shanghai were much exercised to discover the cause of a local rebellion. On careful enquiry they ascertained that the rebellion was due to the shape of a large new temple which had most unfortunately been built in the shape of a tortoise, an animal of the very worst character. The difficulty was serious, the danger was pressing; for to pull down the temple would have been impious, and to let it stand as it was would be to court a succession of similar or worse disasters. However, the genius of the local professors of geomancy, rising to the occasion, triumphantly surmounted the difficulty and obviated the danger. By filling up two wells, which represented the eyes of the tortoise, they at once blinded that disreputable animal and rendered him incapable of doing further mischief.   40

  Sometimes homoeopathic or imitative magic is called in to annul an evil omen by accomplishing it in mimicry. The effect is to circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for a real one. In Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a regular system. Here every man’s fortune is determined by the day or hour of his birth, and if that happens to be an unlucky one his fate is sealed, unless the mischief can be extracted, as the phrase goes, by means of a substitute. The ways of extracting the mischief are various. For example, if a man is born on the first day of the second month (February), his house will be burnt down when he comes of age. To take time by the forelock and avoid this catastrophe, the friends of the infant will set up a shed in a field or in the cattle-fold and burn it. If the ceremony is to be really effective, the child and his mother should be placed in the shed and only plucked, like brands, from the burning hut before it is too late. Again, dripping November is the month of tears, and he who is born in it is born to sorrow. But in order to disperse the clouds that thus gather over his future, he has nothing to do but to take the lid off a boiling pot and wave it about. The drops that fall from it will accomplish his destiny and so prevent the tears from trickling from his eyes. Again, if fate has decreed that a young girl, still unwed, should see her children, still unborn, descend before her with sorrow to the grave, she can avert the calamity as follows. She kills a grasshopper, wraps it in a rag to represent a shroud, and mourns over it like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted. Moreover, she takes a dozen or more other grasshoppers, and having removed some of their superfluous legs and wings she lays them about their dead and shrouded fellow. The buzz of the tortured insects and the agitated motions of their mutilated limbs represent the shrieks and contortions of the mourners at a funeral. After burying the deceased grasshopper she leaves the rest to continue their mourning till death releases them from their pain; and having bound up her dishevelled hair she retires from the grave with the step and carriage of a person plunged in grief. Thenceforth she looks cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her; for it cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over. Once more, if fortune has frowned on a man at his birth and penury has marked him for her own, he can easily erase the mark in question by purchasing a couple of cheap pearls, price three halfpence, and burying them. For who but the rich of this world can thus afford to fling pearls away?   41