night in his hammock in an Indian hut in South America, and all the inhabitants seemed to he asleep, each family in its own place, his reflexions were interrupted by a strange sight. "In a dark corner there arose an old woman, naked, covered with dust and ashes, a miserable picture of hunger and wretchedness; it was the slave of my hosts, a captive taken from another tribe. She crept cautiously to the hearth and blew up the fire, brought out some herbs and bits of human hair, murmured something in an earnest tone, and grinned and gesticulated strangely towards the children of her masters. She scratched a skull, threw herbs and hair rolled into balls into the fire, and so on. For a long while I could not conceive what all this meant, till at last springing from my hammock and corning close to her, I saw by her terror and the imploring gesture she made to me not to betray her, that she was practising magic arts to destroy the children of her enemies and oppressors." "This," he continues, "was not the first example of sorcery I had met with among the Indians. When I considered what delusions and darkness must have been working in the human mind before man could come to fear and invoke dark unknown powers for another's hurt,— when I considered that so complex a superstition was but the remnant of an originally pure worship of nature, and what a chain of complications must have preceded such a degradation," etc. etc.[1]
I cannot but think that Dr. Martius's deduction is the absolute reverse of the truth. Looking at the practices of sorcery among the lower races as a whole, they have not the appearance of mutilated and misunderstood fragments of a higher system of belief and knowledge. Among savage tribes we find families of customs and superstitions in great part traceable to the same principle, the confusion of imagination and reality, of subjective and objective, of the mind and the outer world. Among the higher races we find indeed many of the same customs, but they are scattered, practised by the vulgar with little notion of their meaning, looked down upon with contempt by the more instructed, or explained as mystic symbolisms, and at last dropped
- ↑ Dr. v. Martius, 'Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Amerikanischen Menschheit;' 1839. But see below, chap. xiii., as to this eminent ethnologist's change of opinion.
