group, mentioned to me by Mr. Spottiswoode, is particularly interesting. In Thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan-berries, a rag, or any small article, touched by a sick person and then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick person from the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Burton's suggestion that the rags, locks of hair, and what not, hung on trees near sacred places by the superstitious from Mexico to India and from Ethiopia to Ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles of disease; the African 'devil's trees' and the sacred trees of Sindh, hung with rags through which votaries have transferred their complaints, being typical cases of a practice surviving in lands of higher culture.
The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to objects may be human souls. Indeed one of the most natural cases of the fetish-theory is when a soul inhabits or haunts what is left of its former body. It is plain enough that by a simple association of ideas the dead person is imagined to keep up a connexion with his remains. Thus we read of the Mandan women going year after year to take food to the skulls of their dead kinsfolk, and sitting by the hour to chat and jest in their most endearing strain with the relics of a husband or child;[1] thus the Guinea negroes, who keep the bones of parents in chests, will go to talk with them in the little huts which serve for their tombs.[2] And thus, from the savage who keeps and carries with his household property the cleaned bones of his forefathers,[3] to
- ↑ Catlin, 'N. A. Indians,' vol. i. p. 90.
- ↑ J. L. Wilson, 'W. Africa,' p. 394.
- ↑ Meiners, 'Gesch. der Rel.' vol. i. p. 305; J. G. Müller, p. 209.
Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. ii. p. 375, vol. iii. p. 286; Halliwell, 'Pop. Rhymes,' p. 208; R. Hunt, 'Pop. Romances,' 2nd Series, p. 211; Hylten-Cavallius, 'Wärend och Wirdarne,' vol. i. p. 173. It is said, however, that rags fastened on trees by Gypsies, which passers-by avoid with horror as having diseases thus banned into them, are only signs left for the information of fellow vagrants; Liebich, 'Die Zigeuner,' p. 96.
