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ANIMISM.

the object as a body. Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll; this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat at a modern spirit-séance.[1] Among the Salish Indians of Oregon, the conjurers bring back men's lost souls as little stones or bones or splinters, and pretend to pass them down through the tops of their heads into their hearts, but great care must be taken to remove the spirits of any dead people that may be in the lot, for the patient receiving one would die.[2] There are indigenous Kol tribes of India who work out this idea curiously in bringing back the soul of a deceased man into the house after the funeral, apparently to be worshipped as a household spirit; while some catch the spirit re-embodied in a fowl or fish, the Binjwar of Raepore bring it home in a pot of water, and the Bunjia in a pot of flour.[3] The Chinese hold such theories with extreme distinctness, considering one of a man's three spirits to take up its abode in the ancestral tablet, where it receives messages and worship from the survivors; while the long keeping of the dead man's gilt and lacquered coffin, and the reverence and offerings continued at the tomb, are connected with the thought of a spirit lingering about the corpse. Consistent with these quaint ideas are ceremonies in vogue in China, of bringing home in a cock (live or artificial) the spirit of a man deceased in a distant place, and of enticing into a sick man's coat the departing spirit which has already left his body, and so conveying it back.[4] Tatar folklore illustrates the idea of soul-embodiment in the quaint but intelligible story of the demon-giant who could not be slain, for he did not keep his soul in his body, but in a twelve-

  1. Darwin, 'Journal,' p. 458.
  2. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 320.
  3. 'Report of Jubbulpore Ethnological Committee,' Nagpore, 1868, part i. p. 5.
  4. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. pp. 151, 207, 214, vol. ii. p. 401; see Plath, 'Religion der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 59, part ii. p. 101.