snares near his house and watched for the flight of his soul. If in the shape of a bird or an insect it was caught in the snare the man would infallibly die.[1] Among the Sereres of Senegambia, when a man wishes to revenge himself on his enemy he goes to the Fitaure (chief and priest in one), and prevails on him by presents to conjure the soul of his enemy into a large jar of red earthenware, which is then deposited under a consecrated tree. The man whose soul is shut up in the jar soon dies.[2] Some of the Congo negroes think that enchanters can get possession of human souls, and enclosing them in tusks of ivory, sell them to the white man, who makes them work for him in his country under the sea. It is believed that very many of the coast labourers are men thus obtained; so when these people go to trade they often look anxiously about for their dead relations. The man whose soul is thus sold into slavery will die “in due course, if not at the time.”[3]
In Hawaii there were sorcerers who caught souls of living people, shut them up in calabashes, and gave them to people to eat. By squeezing a captured soul in their hands they discovered the place where people had been secretly buried.[4] Amongst the Canadian Indians, when a wizard wished to kill a man, he sent out his familiar spirits, who brought him the victim’s soul in the shape of a stone or the like. The wizard struck the soul with a sword or an axe till it bled profusely, and as it bled the man to whom it belonged languished and died.[5] In Amboina if a doctor is con-
- ↑ Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific,^. 171; id., Life in the Southern Isles, p. 181 sqq.
- ↑ L. J. B. Bérenger-Féraud, Les Peuplades de la Sénégambie (Paris, 1879), p. 277.
- ↑ W. H. Bentley, Life on the Congo (London, 1887), p. 71.
- ↑ Bastian, Allerlei aus Volks- und Menschenkunde (Berlin, 1888), i. 119.
- ↑ Relations des Jésuites, 1637, p. 50.
