Professor Robert H. Lowie has written a companion volume to
his Primitive Society in Primitive Religion (Routledge) in which he contrasts and examines four different types of primi- tive religions, the Crow, the Ekoi, the Bukaua and the Poly- nesian. He particularly emphasizes the part that the super- natural plays in each. The Ekoi, for instance, lay much stress on sorcery. If there seem to them to be an unnatural number of deaths occurring, someone is accused of practising black magic, and their only chance of proving their innocence is to submit to the test of drinking a poisonous potion or of having boiling oil poured on their hands. If they come through these ordeals unhurt, their character is cleared. Even this procedure, Professor Lowie points out, is fairer to the victim than were European laws two hundred years ago, when women were tortured and burnt for witchcraft without being given any chance to clear themselves at all, and for no visible crime. Among the Ekoi, however, even when the victims are perfectly innocent, they are sometimes made to believe in their own guilt—so vividly do the accusers suggest their crime to them. Thus a wife has been known to admit that she sent a snake out from her mouth at night to poison her husband's wound, and two men once confessed to having turned themselves into crocodiles in order to kill some women,
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