The Making of Religion Part 15

A good example of savage possession is given in his travels by Captain Jonathan Carver (1763).

Carver was waiting impatiently for the arrival of traders with provisions, near the Thousand Lakes. A priest, or jossakeed, offered to interview the Great Spirit, and obtain information. A large lodge was arranged, and the covering drawn up (which is unusual), so that what went on within might be observed. In the centre was a chest-shaped arrangement of stakes, so far apart from each other 'that whatever lay within them was readily to be discerned.' The tent was illuminated 'by a great number of torches.' The priest came in, and was first wrapped in an elk's skin, as Highland seers were wrapped in a black bull's hide. Forty yards of rope made of elk's hide were then coiled about him, till he 'was wound up like an Egyptian mummy.'

I have elsewhere shown[26] that this custom of binding with bonds the seer who is to be inspired, existed in Graeco-Egyptian spiritualism, among Samoyeds, Eskimo, Canadian Hareskin Indians, and among Australian blacks.

'The head, body, and limbs are wound round with stringy bark cords.'[27]

This is an extraordinary range of diffusion of a ceremony apparently meaningless. Is the idea that, by loosing the bonds, the seer demonstrates the agency of spirits, after the manner of the Davenport Brothers?[28] But the Graeco-Egyptian medium did _not_ undo the swathings of linen, in which he was rolled, _like a mummy_. They had to be unswathed for him, by others.[29] Again, a dead body, among the Australians, is corded up tight, as soon as the breath is out of it, if it is to be buried, or before being exposed on a platform, if that is the custom.[30] Again, in the Highlands second-sight was thus acquired: the would-be seer 'must run a Tedder (tether) of Hair, _which bound a corpse to the Bier_, about his Middle from end to end,' and then look between his legs till he sees a funeral cross two marches.[31] The Greenland seer is bound 'with his head between his legs.'[32]

Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him? In three remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the seer is tied up--in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.

Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom; it seems to cease in Labrador, and elsewhere, southwards, where the prophet enters a magic lodge, unbound. Among the Narquapees, he sits cross-legged, and the lodge begins to answer questions by leaping about.[33] The Eskimo bounds, though he is tied up.

It would be decisive, if we could find that, wherever the sorcerer is bound, the dead are bound also. I note the following examples, but the Creeks do not, I think, bind the magician.

Among the Creeks,

'The corpse is placed in a hole, with a blanket wrapped about it, and the legs bent under it _and tied together_.'[34] The dead Greenlanders were 'wrapped and sewed up in their best deer-skins.'[35]

Carver could only learn that, among the Indians he knew, dead bodies were 'wrapped in skins;' that they were also swathed with cords he does not allege, but he was not permitted to see all the ceremonies.

My theory is, at least, plausible, for this manner of burying the dead, tied tightly up, with the head between the legs (as in the practice of Scottish and Greenland seers), is very old and widely diffused. Ellis says, of the Tahitians, 'the body of the dead man was ... placed in a sitting posture, with the knees elevated, _the face pressed down between the knees_,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly round.'[36]

The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost, from 'walking.' I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to await inspiration. But I submit that the frequency of the savage form of burial with the corpse tied up, or swathed, sometimes with the head between the legs; and the recurrence of the savage practice of similarly binding the sorcerer, probably points to a purpose of introducing the seer to the society of the dead. The custom, as applied to prophets, might survive, even where the burial rite had altered, or cannot be ascertained, and might survive, for corpses, where it had gone out of use, for seers.

The Scotch used to justify their practice of putting the head between the knees when, bound with a corpse's hair tether, they learned to be second-sighted, by what Elijah did. The prophet, on the peak of Carmel, 'cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees.'[37] But the cases are not a.n.a.logous. Elijah had been hearing a premonitory 'sound of abundance of rain' in a cloudless sky. He was probably engaged in prayer, not in prophecy.

Kirk, by the way, notes that if the wind changes, while the Scottish seer is bound, he is in peril of his life. So children are told, in Scotland, that, if the wind changes while they are making faces, the grimace will be permanent. The seer will, in the same way, become what he pretends to be, a corpse.

This desertion of Carver's tale may be pardoned for the curiosity of the topic. He goes on:

'Being thus bound up like an Egyptian mummy' (Carver unconsciously making my point), 'the seer was lifted into the chest-like enclosure. I could now also discern him as plain as I had ever done, and I took care not to turn my eyes away a moment'--in which effort he probably failed.

The priest now began to mutter, and finally spoke in a mixed jargon of scarcely intelligible dialects. He now yelled, prayed, and foamed at the mouth, till in about three quarters of an hour he was exhausted and speechless. 'But in an instant he sprang upon his feet, notwithstanding at the time he was put in it appeared impossible for him to move either his legs or arms, and shaking off his covering, as quick as if the bands with which it had been bound were burst asunder,' he prophesied. The Great Spirit did not say when the traders would arrive, but, just after high noon, next day, a canoe would arrive, and the people in it would tell when the traders were to appear.

Next day, just after high noon, a canoe came round a point of land about a league away, and the men in it, who had met the traders, said they would come in two days, which they did. Carver, professing freedom from any tincture of credulity, leaves us 'to draw what conclusions we please.'

The natural inference is 'private information,' about which the only difficulty is that Carver, who knew the topography and the chances of a secret messenger arriving to prompt the Jossakeed, does not allude to this theory.[38] He seems to think such successes not uncommon.

All that psychology can teach anthropology, on this whole topic of 'possession;' is that secondary or alternating personalities are facts _in rerum natura_, that the man or woman in one personality may have no conscious memory of what was done or said in the other, and that cases of knowledge said to be supernormally gained in the secondary state are worth inquiring about, if there be a chance of getting good evidence.

A few fairly respectable savage instances are given in Dr. Gibier's 'Le Fakirisme Occidental' and in Mr. Manning's 'Old New Zealand;' but, while modern civilised parallels depend on the solitary case of Mrs. Piper (for no other case has been well observed), no affirmative conclusion can be drawn from Chinese, Maori, Zulu, or Red Indian practice.

[Footnote 1: _Among the Zulus_, p. 120.]

[Footnote 2:_ Burmah_, p. 107.]

[Footnote 3: Hodgson, _Proceedings_, S.P.E., vol. xiii. pt. x.x.xiii. Dr.

Hodgson by no means agrees with this view of the case--the case of Mrs.

Piper.]

[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 184.]

[Footnote 5: Nevius's _Demon Possession in China_, a curious collection of examples by an American missionary. The reports of Catholic missionaries abound in cases.]

[Footnote 6: Op. cit. p. 169.]

[Footnote 7: Putnam, 1881.]

[Footnote 8: Nevius, p. 33.]

[Footnote 9: Ibid. p. 35.]

[Footnote 10: Op. cit. p. 38.]

[Footnote 11: See 'Fetishism and Spiritualism.']

[Footnote 12: _Necroses et Idees Fixes_. Alcan, Paris, 1898. This is the first of a series of works connected with the Laboratoire de Psychologie, at the Salpetritere, in Paris.]

[Footnote 13: 'Macleod shall return, but Macrimmon shall never!']

[Footnote 14: See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Personnalite,_; Bourru et Burot, _Variations de la Personnalite_; Janet, _L'Automatisme Psychologique_; James, _Principles of Psychology_; Myers, in _Proceedings_ of S.P.R., 'The Mechanism of Genius,' 'The Subliminal Self.']

[Footnote 15: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 133.]

[Footnote 16: Doolittle's _Chinese_, i. 143; ii. 110, 320.]

[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., pt. x.x.xiii.]

[Footnote 18: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vi. 436-650; viii. 1-167; xiii.

284-582].

[Footnote 19: _The Will to Believe_, p. 814.]

[Footnote 20: _Figaro_, January 14, 1895.]

[Footnote 21: _Proceedings_, vi. 605, 606.]

[Footnote 22: _Proceedings_, S.P.R, part x.x.xiii. vol. xiii.]

[Footnote 23: Op. cit. part x.x.xiii. p. 406.]

[Footnote 24: See 'Fetishism.' Compare Callaway, p. 328.]

[Footnote 25: Callaway, pp. 361-374.]

[Footnote 26: _c.o.c.k Lane and Common Sense_, p. 66.]

[Footnote 27: Brough Smyth, i. 475. This point is disputed, but I did not invent it, and a case appears in Mr. Curr's work on the natives.]

[Footnote 28: _Prim. Cult_. i. 152.]