Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden Bough. 1922.

Page 189

Repeat this thrice and after every repetition blow through your hollow fist. Or you may catch the soul in your turban, thus. Go out on the night of the full moon and the two succeeding nights; sit down on an ant-hill facing the moon, burn incense, and recite the following incantation:

“I bring you a betel leaf to chew,

Dab the lime on to it, Prince Ferocious,

For Somebody, Prince Distraction’s daughter, to chew.

Somebody at sunrise be distraught for love of me

Somebody at sunset be distraught for love of me.

As you remember your parents, remember me;

As you remember your house and houseladder, remember me;

When thunder rumbles, remember me;

When wind whistles, remember me;

When the heavens rain, remember me;

When cocks crow, remember me;

When the dial-bird tells its tales, remember me;

When you look up at the sun, remember me;

When you look up at the moon, remember me,

For in that self-same moon I am there.

Cluck! cluck! soul of Somebody come hither to me.

I do not mean to let you have my soul,

Let your soul come hither to mine.”

Now wave the end of your turban towards the moon seven times each night. Go home and put it under your pillow, and if you want to wear it in the daytime, burn incense and say, “It is not a turban that I carry in my girdle, but the soul of Somebody.”

The Indians of the Nass River, in British Columbia, are impressed with a belief that a physician may swallow his patient’s soul by mistake. A doctor who is believed to have done so is made by the other members of the faculty to stand over the patient, while one of them thrusts his fingers down the doctor’s throat, another kneads him in the stomach with his knuckles, and a third slaps him on the back. If the soul is not in him after all, and if the same process has been repeated upon all the medical men without success, it is concluded that the soul must be in the head-doctor’s box. A party of doctors, therefore, waits upon him at his house and requests him to produce his box. When he has done so and arranged its contents on a new mat, they take the votary of Aesculapius and hold him up by the heels with his head in a hole in the floor. In this position they wash his head, and “any water remaining from the ablution is taken and poured upon the sick man’s head.” No doubt the lost soul is in the water.

3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection

BUT the spiritual dangers I have enumerated are not the only ones which beset the savage. Often he regards his shadow or reflection as his soul, or at all events as a vital part of himself, and as such it is necessarily a source of danger to him. For if it is trampled upon, struck, or stabbed, he will feel the injury as if it were done to his person; and if it is detached from him entirely (as he believes that it may be) he will die. In the island of Wetar there are magicians who can make a man ill by stabbing his shadow with a pike or hacking it with a sword. After Sankara had destroyed the Buddhists in India, it is said that he journeyed to Nepaul, where he had some difference of opinion with the Grand Lama. To prove his supernatural powers, he soared into

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD