LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

on the grave and beg their ancestors to allow the soul of the sick to return, or to drive it home speedily if it should be lingering by the way.180

      Attempts to rescue the lost soul from the spirits of the dead who are detaining it.

      In Bolang Mongondo, a district in the west of Celebes, all sickness is ascribed to the ancestral spirits who have carried off the patient's soul. The object therefore is to bring back the soul of the sufferer and restore it to him. An eye-witness has thus described the attempted cure of a sick boy. The priestesses, who acted as physicians, made a doll of cloth and fastened it to the point of a spear, which an old woman held upright. Round this doll the priestesses danced, uttering charms, and chirruping as when one calls a dog. Then the old woman lowered the point of the spear a little, so that the priestesses could reach the doll. By this time the soul of the sick boy was supposed to be in the doll, having been brought into it by the incantations. So the priestesses approached it cautiously on tiptoe and caught the soul in the many-coloured cloths which they had been waving in the air. Then they laid the soul on the boy's head, that is, they wrapped his head in the cloth in which the soul was supposed to be, and stood still for some moments with great gravity, holding their hands on the patient's head. Suddenly there was a jerk, the priestesses whispered and shook their heads, and the cloth was taken off – the soul had escaped. The priestesses gave chase to it, running round and round the house, clucking and gesticulating as if they were driving hens into a poultry-yard. At last they recaptured the soul at the foot of the stair and restored it to its owner as before.181 Much in the same way an Australian medicine-man will sometimes bring the lost soul of a sick man into a puppet and restore it to the patient by pressing the puppet to his breast.182 In Uea, one of the Loyalty Islands, the souls of the dead seem to have been credited with the power of stealing the souls of the living. For when a man was sick the soul-doctor would go with a large troop of men and women to the graveyard. Here the men played on flutes and the women whistled softly to lure the soul home. After this had gone on for some time they formed in procession and moved homewards, the flutes playing and the women whistling all the way, while they led back the wandering soul and drove it gently along with open palms. On entering the patient's dwelling they commanded the soul in a loud voice to enter his body.183 In Madagascar when a man was sick or lunatic in consequence of the loss of his soul, his friends despatched a wizard in haste to fetch him a soul from the graveyard. The emissary repaired by night to the spot, and having made a hole in the wooden house which served as a tomb, begged the spirit of the patient's father to bestow a soul on his son or daughter, who had none. So saying he applied a bonnet to the hole, then folded it up and rushed back to the house of the sufferer, saying he had a soul for him. With that he clapped the bonnet on the head of the invalid, who at once said he felt much better and had recovered the soul which he had lost.184

      Rescuing the soul from the dead in Borneo and Melanesia.

      When a Dyak or Malay of some of the western tribes or districts of Borneo is taken ill, with vomiting and profuse sweating as the only symptoms, he thinks that one of his deceased kinsfolk or ancestors is at the bottom of it. To discover which of them is the culprit, a wise man or woman pulls a lock of hair on the crown of the sufferer's head, calling out the names of all his dead relations. The name at which the lock gives forth a sound is the name of the guilty party. If the patient's hair is too short to be tugged with effect, he knocks his forehead seven times against the forehead of a kinsman who has long hair. The hair of the latter is then tugged instead of that of the patient and answers to the test quite as well. When the blame has thus been satisfactorily laid at the door of the ghost who is responsible for the sickness, the physician, who, as in other countries, is often an old woman, remonstrates with him on his ill behaviour. “Go back,” says she, “to your grave; what do you come here for? The soul of the sick man does not choose to be called by you, and will remain yet a long time in its body.” Then she puts some ashes from the hearth in a winnowing fan and moulds out of them a small figure or image in human likeness. Seven times she moves the basket with the little ashen figure up and down before the patient, taking care not to obliterate the figure, while at the same time she says, “Sickness, settle in the head, belly, hands, etc.; then quickly pass into the corresponding part of the image,” whereupon the patient spits on the ashen image and pushes it from him with his left hand. Next the beldame lights a candle and goes to the grave of the person whose ghost is doing all the mischief. On the grave she throws the figure of ashes, calling out, “Ghost, plague the sick man no longer, and stay in your grave, that he may see you no more.” On her return she asks the anxious relations in the house, “Has his soul come back?” and they must answer quickly, “Yes, the soul of the sick man has come back.” Then she stands beside the patient, blows out the candle which had lighted the returning soul on its way, and strews yellow-coloured rice on the head of the convalescent, saying, “Cluck, soul! cluck, soul! cluck, soul!” Last of all she fastens on his right wrist a bracelet or ring which he must wear for three days.185 In this case we see that the saving of the soul is combined with a vicarious sacrifice to the ghost, who receives a puppet on which to work his will instead of on the poor soul. In San Cristoval, one of the Melanesian islands, the vicarious sacrifice takes the form of a pig or a fish. A malignant ghost of the name of Tapia is supposed to have seized on the sick man's soul and tied it up to a banyan-tree. Accordingly a man who has influence with Tapia takes a pig or fish to the holy place where the ghost resides and offers it to him, saying, “This is for you to eat in place of that man; eat this, don't kill him.” This satisfies the ghost; the soul is loosed from the tree and carried back to the sufferer, who naturally recovers.186 A regular part of the stock-in-trade of a Dyak medicine-man is a crystal into which he gazes to detect the hiding-place of a lost soul or to identify the demon who is causing the sickness.187 In one of the New Hebrides a ghost will sometimes impound the souls of trespassers within a magic fence in his garden, and will only consent to pull up the fence and let the souls out on receiving an unqualified apology and a satisfactory assurance that no personal disrespect was intended.188 In Motlav, another Melanesian island, it is enough to call out the sick man's name in the sacred place where he rashly intruded, and then, when the cry of the kingfisher or some other bird is heard, to shout “Come back” to the soul of the sick man and run back with it to the house.189

      Buryat mode of recovering a lost soul from the nether world.

      It is a comparatively easy matter to save a soul which is merely tied up to a tree or detained as a vagrant in a pound; but it is a far harder task to fetch it up from the nether world, if it once gets down there. When a Buryat shaman is called in to attend a patient, the first thing he does is to ascertain where exactly the soul of the invalid is; for it may have strayed, or been stolen, or be languishing in the prison of the gloomy Erlik, lord of the world below. If it is anywhere in the neighbourhood, the shaman soon catches and replaces it in the patient's body. If it is far away, he searches the wide world till he finds it, ransacking the deep woods, the lonely steppes, and the bottom of the sea, not to be thrown off the scent even though the cunning soul runs to the sheep-walks in the hope that its footprints will be lost among the tracks of the sheep. But when the whole world has been searched in vain for the errant soul, the shaman knows that there is nothing for it but to go down to hell and seek the lost one among the spirits in prison. At the stern call of duty he does not flinch, though he knows that the journey is toilsome, and that the travelling expenses, which are naturally defrayed by the patient, are very heavy. Sometimes the lord of the infernal regions will only agree to release the soul on condition of receiving another in its stead, and that one the soul of the sick man's dearest friend. If the patient consents to the substitution, the shaman turns himself into a hawk, pounces upon the soul of the friend as it soars from his slumbering body in the form of a lark, and hands over the fluttering, struggling thing to the grim warden of the dead, who thereupon sets the soul of the sick man at liberty. So the sick man recovers and his friend dies. Скачать книгу