the longest possible time. Something besides mourning must be made responsible for the peculiarities of taboo customs, something which evidently serves a different purpose. It is this very taboo on names which reveals this still unknown motive, and if the customs did not tell us about it we would find it out from the statements of the mourning savages themselves.
For they do not conceal the fact that they fear the presence and the return of the spirit of a dead person; they practice a host of ceremonies to keep him off and banish him.[1] They look upon the mention of his name as a conjuration which must result in his immediate presence.[2] They therefore consistently do everything to avoid conjuring and awakening a dead person. They disguise themselves in order that the spirit may not recognize them,[3] they distort either his name or their own, and become infuriated when a ruthless stranger incites the spirit against his survivors by mentioning his name. We can hardly avoid the conclusion that they suffer, according to Wundt’s expression, from the fear of “his soul now turned into a demon.”[4]
- ↑ Frazer, 1. c., p. 353, cites the Tuaregs of the Sahara as an example of such an acknowledgment.
- ↑ Perhaps this condition is to be added: as long as any part of his physical remains exist. Frazer, 1. c., p. 372.
- ↑ “On the Nikobar Islands,” Frazer, 1. c., p. 382.
- ↑ Wundt, “Religion and Myth,” Vol. II, p. 49.
