The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1

Image of the god Jagannāth, a form of Vishnu

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

60. The faculty of counting. Confusion of the individual and the species

But primitive man not only considered the body as a homogeneous mass with the life and qualities distributed equally over it. He further, it may be suggested, did not distinguish between the individual and the species. The reason for this was that he could not count, and had no idea of numbers. The faculty of counting appears to have been acquired very late. Messrs. Spencer and Gillan remark of the aborigines of Central Australia:126 “While in matters such as tracking, which are concerned with their everyday life, and upon efficiency in which they actually depend for their livelihood, the natives show conspicuous ability, there are other directions in which they are as conspicuously deficient. This is perhaps shown most clearly in the matter of counting. At Alice Springs they occasionally count, sometimes using their fingers in doing so, up to five, but frequently anything beyond four is indicated by the word oknira, meaning ‘much’ or ‘great.’ One is nintha, two thrama or thera, three mapitcha, four therankathera, five therankathera-nintha.” The form of these words is interesting, because it is clear that the word for four is two and two, or twice two, and the word for five is two and two and one. These words indicate the prolonged and painful efforts which must have been necessary to count as far as five, and this though in other respects the Australian natives show substantial mental development, having a most complicated system of exogamy, and sometimes two personal names for each individual. Again, the Andamanese islanders, despite the extraordinary complexity of their agglutinative language, have no names for the numerals beyond two.127 It is said that the Majhwār tribe can only count up to three, while among the Bhatras the qualification for being a village astrologer, who foretells the character of the rainfall and gives auspicious days for sowing and harvest, is the ability to count a certain number of posts. The astrologer’s title is Meda Gantia, or Counter of Posts. The above facts demonstrate that counting is a faculty acquired with difficulty after considerable mental progress, and primitive man apparently did not feel the necessity for it.128 But if he could not count, it seems a proper deduction that his eye would not distinguish a number of animals of the same species together, because the ability to do this, and to appraise distinct individuals of like appearance appears to depend ultimately on the faculty of counting. Major Hendley, a doctor and therefore a skilled observer, states that the Bhīls were unable to distinguish colours or to count numbers, apparently on account of their want of words to express themselves.129 Now it seems clearly more easy for the eye to discriminate between opposing colours than to distinguish a number of individuals of the same species together. There are a few things which we still cannot count, such as the blades of grass, the ears of corn, drops of rain, snowflakes, and hailstones. All of these things are still spoken of in the singular, though this is well known to be scientifically incorrect. We say an expanse of grass, a field of corn, and so on, as if the grass and corn were all one plant instead of an innumerable quantity of plants. Apparently when primitive man saw a number of animals or trees of the same species together, the effect on him must have been exactly the same as that of a field of grass or corn on us. He could be conscious only of an indefinite sense of magnitude. But he did not know, as we do in the cases cited, that the objects he saw were really a collection of distinct individuals. He would naturally consider them as all one, just as children would think a field of grass or corn to be one great plant until they were told otherwise. But there was no one to tell him, nor any means by which he could find out his mistake. He had no plural number, and no definite or indefinite articles. Whether he saw one or a hundred tigers together, he could only describe them by the one word tiger. It was a long time before he could even say ‘much tiger,’ as the Australian natives still have to do if they see more animals than five together, and the Andamanese if they see more than two. The hypothesis therefore seems reasonable that at first man considered each species of animals or plants which he distinguished to have a separate single life, of which all the individuals were pieces or members. The separation of different parts of one living body presented no difficulties to his mind, since, as already seen, he believed the life to continue in severed fractions of the human body.

A connection between individuals, apparently based on the idea that they have a common life, has been noticed in other cases. Thus at the commencement of the patriarchal state of society, when the child is believed to derive its life from its father, any carelessness in the father’s conduct may injuriously affect the child. Sir E.B. Tylor notes this among the tribes of South America. After the birth of a child among the Indians of South America the father would eat no regular cooked food, not suitable for children, as he feared that if he did this his child would die.130 “Among the Arawaks of Surinam for some time after the birth of a child the father must fell no tree, fire no gun, hunt no large game; he may stay near home, shoot little birds with a bow and arrow, and angle for little fish; but his time hanging heavy on his hands the only comfortable thing he can do is to lounge in his hammock.”131 On another occasion a savage who had lately become a father, refused snuff, of which he was very fond, because his sneezing would endanger the life of his newly-born child. They believed that any intemperance or carelessness of the father, such as drinking, eating large quantities of meat, swimming in cold weather, riding till he was tired and sweated, would endanger the child’s life, and if the child died, the father was bitterly reproached with having caused its death by some such indiscretion.132 Here the idea clearly seems to be that the father’s and child’s life are one, the latter being derived from and part of the former. The custom of the Couvade may therefore perhaps be assigned to the early patriarchal stage. The first belief was that the child derived its life from its mother, and apparently that the weakness and debility of the mother after childbirth were due to the fact that she had given up a part of her life to the child. When the system of female descent changed to male descent, the woman was taken from another clan into her husband’s; the child, being born in its father’s clan, obviously could not draw its life from its mother, who was originally of a different clan. The inference was that it drew its life from its father; consequently the father, having parted with a part of his life to his child, had to imitate the conduct of the mother after childbirth, abstain from any violent exertion, and sometimes feign weakness and lie up in the house, so as not to place any undue strain on the severed fraction of his life in his child, which would be simultaneously affected with his own, but was much more fragile.

61. Similarity and identity

Again, primitive man had no conception of likeness or similarity, nor did he realise an imitation as distinct from the thing imitated. Likeness or similarity and imitation are abstract ideas, for which he had no words, and consequently did not conceive of them. And clearly if one had absolutely no term signifying likeness or similarity, and if one wished to indicate say, that something resembled a goat, all one could do would be to point at the goat and the object resembling it and say ‘goat,’ ‘goat.’ Since the name was held to be part of the thing named, such a method would strengthen the idea that resemblance was equivalent to identity. This point of view can also be observed in children, who have no difficulty in thinking that any imitation or toy model is just as good as the object or animal imitated, and playing with it as such. Even to call a thing by the name of any object is sufficient with children to establish its identity with that object for the purposes of a game or mimicry, and a large part of children’s games are based on such pretensions. They also have not yet clearly grasped the difference between likeness and identity, and between an imitation of an object and the object itself. A large part of the category of substituted ceremonies and sacrifices are based on this confusion between similarity and identity. Thus when the Hindus put four pieces of stick into a pumpkin and call it a goat, they do not mean to cheat the god to whom it is offered, but fancy that when they have made a likeness of a goat and called it a goat, it is a goat, at any rate for the purpose of sacrifice. And when the Jains, desiring to eat after sunset against the rule of their religion, place a lamp under a sieve and call it the sun, and eat by it, they are acting on the same principle and think they have avoided committing a sin. A Baiga should go to his wedding on an elephant, but as he cannot obtain a real elephant, two wooden cots are lashed together and covered with blankets, with a black cloth trunk in front, and this arrangement passes muster for an elephant. A small gold image of a cat is offered to a Brāhman in expiation for killing a cat, silver eyes are offered to the goddess to save the eyes of a person suffering from smallpox, a wisp of straw is burnt on a man’s grave as a substitute for cremating the body, a girl is married to an image of a man made of kusha grass, and so on. In rites where blood is required vermilion is used as a substitute for blood; on the other hand castes which abstain from flesh sometimes also decline to eat red vegetables and fruits, because the red colour is held to make them resemble and be equivalent to blood. These beliefs survive in religious ceremonial long after the hard logic of facts has dispelled them from ordinary life.133 Thus when an image of a god was made it was at once the god and contained part of his life. Primitive man had no idea of an imitation or an image nor of a lifeless object, and therefore could not conceive of the representation being anything else than the god. Only in later times was some ceremony of conveying life to the image considered requisite. The prohibition of sculpture among the Jews and of painting among the Muhammadans was based on this view,134 because sculptures and paintings were not considered as images or representations, but as living beings or gods, and consequently false gods. The world-wide custom of making an image of a man with intent to injure him arises from the same belief. Since primitive man could conceive neither of an imitation nor of an inanimate object, the image of a man was to his view the man; there was nothing else which it could be. And thus it contained part of the man’s life, just as every idol of a god was the god himself and contained part of the god’s life. Since the man’s life was common to himself and the image, by injuring or destroying the image it was held that the man’s life would similarly be injured or destroyed, on the analogy already explained of injury to life being frequently observed to follow a hurt or wound of any part of the body. Afterwards the connection between the man and the image was strengthened by working into the material of the latter some fraction of his body, such as severed hair or the earth pressed by his foot. But this was not necessary to the original belief. The objection often raised by savages to having their photographs taken or pictures painted may be explained in the same manner. Here the photograph or picture cannot be realised as a simple imitation; it is held to be the man himself, and must therefore contain part of his life. Hence any one in whose possession it is can do him harm by injuring or destroying the photograph or picture, according to the method of reasoning already explained. The superstitions against looking in a mirror, especially after dark, or seeing one’s reflection in water, are analogous cases. Here the reflection in the mirror or water is held to be the person himself, because savages do not understand the nature of the reflected image. It is the person himself, but has no corporeal substance; therefore the reflection must be his ghost or spirit. But if the spirit appears once it is an omen that it will appear again; and in order that it may do so the man will have to die so that the spirit may be set free from the body in order to appear. The special reason for not looking into a mirror at night would thus be because the night is the usual time for the appearance of spirits. The fable of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image reflected in the water and was drowned, probably arose from the superstition against seeing one’s image reflected in water. And similarly the belief was that a man’s clothes and other possessions contained part of his life by contact; this is the explanation of the custom of representing a person by some implement or article of clothing, such as performing the marriage ceremony with the bridegroom’s sword instead of himself, and sending the bride’s shoes home with the bridegroom to represent her. A barren woman will try to obtain a piece of a pregnant woman’s breast-cloth and will burn it and eat the ashes, thinking thereby to transfer the pregnant woman’s quality of fertility to herself. When a Hindu widow is remarried her clothes and ornaments are sometimes buried on the boundary of her second husband’s village and she puts on new clothes, because it is thought that her first husband’s spirit will remain in the old clothes and give trouble.

62. The recurrence of events

A brief digression may be made here in order to suggest an explanation of another important class of primitive ideas. These arise from the belief that when something has happened, that same event, or some other resembling it, will again occur, or, more briefly, the belief in the recurrence of events. This view is the origin of a large class of omens, and appears to have been originally evolved simply from the recurring phenomena of day and night and of the months and climatic seasons. For suppose that one was in the position of primitive man, knowing absolutely nothing of the nature and constitution of the earth and the heavenly bodies, or of the most elementary facts of astronomy; then, if the question were asked why one expected the sun to rise to-morrow, the only possible answer, and the answer which one would give, would be because it had risen to-day and every day as long as one could remember. The reason so stated might have no scientific value, but would at any rate establish a strong general probability. But primitive man could not have given it in this form, because he had no memory and could not count. Even now comparatively advanced tribes like the Gonds have a hopelessly inaccurate memory for ordinary incidents; and, as suggested subsequently, the faculty of memory was probably acquired very slowly with the development of language. And since he could not count, the continuous recurrence of natural phenomena had no cumulative force with him, so that he might distinguish them from other events. His argument was thus simply “the sun will rise again because it rose before; the moon will wax and wane again because she waxed and waned before”; grass and leaves and fruit would grow again because they did so before; the animals which gave him food would come again as before; and so on. But these were the only events which his brain retained at all, and that only because his existence depended upon them and they continually recurred. The ordinary incidents of life which presented some variation passed without record in his mind, as they still do very largely in those of primitive savages. And since he made no distinction between the different classes of events, holding them all to be the acts of volitional beings, he applied this law of the recurrence of events to every incident of life, and thought that whenever anything happened, reason existed for supposing that the same thing or something like it would happen again. It was sufficient that the second event should be like the first, since, as already seen, he did not distinguish between similarity and identity. Thus, to give instances, the Hindus think that if a man lies full length inside a bed, he is lying as if on a bier and will consequently soon be dead on a real bier; hence beds should be made so that one’s feet project uncomfortably over the end. By a similar reasoning he must not lie with his feet to the south because corpses are laid in this direction. A Hindu married woman always wears glass bangles as a sign of her state, and a widow may not wear them. A married woman must therefore never let her arms be without bangles or it is an omen that she will become a widow. She must not wear wholly white clothes, because a widow wears these. If a man places one of his shoes over the other in the house, it is an omen that he will go on a journey when the shoes will be in a similar position as he walks along. A Kolta woman who desires to ascertain whether she will have a son, puts a fish into a pot full of water and spreads her cloth by it. If the fish jumps into her lap, it is thought that her lap will shortly hold another living being, that is a son. At a wedding, in many Hindu castes, the bride and bridegroom perform the business of their caste or an imitation of it. Among the Kuramwār shepherds the bride and bridegroom are seated with the shuttle which is used for weaving blankets between them. A miniature swing is put up and a doll is placed in it in imitation of a child and swung to and fro. The bride then takes the doll out and gives it to the bridegroom, saying:—“Here, take care of it, I am now going to cook food”; while, after a time, the boy returns the doll to the girl saying, “I must now weave the blanket and go to tend the flock.” Thus, having performed their life’s business at their wedding, it is thought that they will continue to do so happily as long as they live. Many castes, before sowing the real crop, make a pretence of sowing seed before the shrine of the god, and hope thus to ensure that the subsequent sowing will be auspicious. The common stories of the appearance of a ghost, or other variety of apparition, before the deaths of members of a particular family, are based partly on the belief in the recurrence of associated events. The well-known superstition about sitting down thirteen to dinner, on the ground that one of the party may die shortly afterwards, is an instance of the same belief, being of course based on the Last Supper. But the number thirteen is generally unlucky, being held to be so by the Hindus, Muhammadans and Persians, as well as Europeans, and the superstition perhaps arose from its being the number of the intercalary month in the soli-lunar calendar, which is present one year and absent the next year. Thirteen is one more than twelve, the auspicious number of the months of the year. Similarly seven was perhaps lucky or sacred as being the number of the planets which gave their names to the days of the week, and three because it represented the sun, moon and earth. When a gambler stakes his money on a number such as the date of his birth or marriage, he acts on the supposition that a number which has been propitious to him once will be so again, and this appears to be a survival of the belief in the recurrence of events.

63. Controlling the future

But primitive man was not actuated by any abstract love of knowledge, and when he had observed what appeared to him to be a law of nature, he proceeded to turn it to advantage in his efforts for the preservation of his life. Since events had the characteristic of recurrence, all he had to do in order to produce the recurrence of any particular event which he desired, was to cause it to happen in the first instance; and since he did not distinguish between imitation and reality, he thought that if he simply enacted the event he would thus ensure its being brought to pass. And so he assiduously set himself to influence the course of nature to his own advantage. When the Australian aborigines are performing ceremonies for the increase of witchetty grubs, a long narrow structure of boughs is made which represents the chrysalis of the grub. The men of the witchetty grub totem enter the structure and sing songs about the production and growth of the witchetty grub. Then one after another they shuffle out of the chrysalis, and glide slowly along for a distance of some yards, imitating the emergence and movements of the witchetty grubs. By thus enacting the production of the grubs they think to cause and multiply the real production.135 When the men of the emu totem wish to multiply the number of emus, they allow blood from their arms, that is emu blood, to fall on the ground until a certain space is covered. Then on this space a picture is drawn representing the emu; two large patches of yellow indicate lumps of its fat, of which the natives are very fond, but the greater part shows, by means of circles and circular patches, the eggs in various stages of development, some before and some after laying. Then the men of the totem, placing on their heads a stick with a tuft of feathers to represent the long neck and small head of the bird, stand gazing about aimlessly after the manner of the emu. Here the picture itself is held to be a living emu, perhaps the source or centre from which all emus will originate, and the men, pretending to be emus, will cause numbers of actual emus to be produced.136 Before sowing the crops, a common practice is to sow small quantities of grain in baskets or pots in rich soil, so that it will sprout and grow up quickly, the idea being to ensure that the real crop will have a similarly successful growth. These baskets are the well-known Gardens of Adonis fully described in The Golden Bough. They are grown for nine days, and on the tenth day are taken in procession by the women and deposited in a river. The women may be seen carrying the baskets of wheat to the river after the nine days’ fasts of Chait and Kunwār (March and September) in many towns of the Central Provinces, as the Athenian women carried the Gardens of Adonis to the sea on the day that the expedition under Nicias set sail for Syracuse.137 The fire kindled at the Holi festival in spring is meant, as explained by Sir J.G. Frazer, to increase the power of the sun for the growth of vegetation. By the production of fire the quantity and strength of the heavenly fire is increased. He remarks:138—“The custom of throwing blazing discs, shaped like suns, into the air, is probably also a piece of imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic force is supposed to take effect through mimicry or sympathy; by imitating the desired result you actually produce it; by counterfeiting the sun’s progress through the heavens you really help the luminary to pursue his celestial journey with punctuality and despatch. The name ‘fire of heaven,’ by which the midsummer fire is sometimes popularly known, clearly indicates a consciousness of the connection between the earthly and the heavenly flame.” The obscene songs of the Holi appear to be the relic of a former period of promiscuous sexual debauchery, which, through the multiplied act of reproduction, was intended to ensure that nature should also reproduce on a generous scale. The red powder thrown over everybody at the Holi is said to represent the seed of life. The gifts of Easter eggs seem to be the vestige of a rite having the same object. At a wedding in the Lodhi caste the bride is seated before the family god while an old woman brings a stone rolling-pin wrapped up in a piece of cloth, which is supposed to be a baby, and the old woman imitates a baby crying. She puts the roller in the bride’s lap, saying, “Take this and give it milk.” The bride is abashed and throws it aside. The old woman picks it up and shows it to the assembled women, saying, “The bride has just had a baby,” amid loud laughter. Then she gives the stone to the bridegroom, who also throws it aside. This ceremony is meant to induce fertility, and it is supposed that by making believe that the bride has had a baby she will quickly have one. Similar rites are performed in several other castes, and when a girl becomes adult her lap is filled with fruits with the idea that this will cause it subsequently to be filled with the fruit of her womb. The whole custom of giving dolls to girls to play with, perhaps originated in the belief that by doing so they would afterwards come to play with children.