PRIMITIVE WITCHCRAFT.
THERE is not often much material for intellectual specula- tion to be found in a book of travel, but we have found some in an admirable, though rather long-drawn book on British Guiana, by Mr. Everard im Thum*. Mr. im Thurn, who is an Englishman, an Oxford man, and a naturalist of acquirements, devoted himself for some time to a study of the Indian tribes of that colony with certain results, one of which may interest our readers. There is, as many of them will be aware, no more per- plexing subject of thought than the belief in witchcraft, using that word not as it is used in the Book of Samuel, where the witch has power over the dead, or as it was used in the middle ages, when the witches were believed to be devil-worshippers, and were probably worshippers of the old god Pan, but as it is used now, to denote a supposed power possessed by individuals of both sexes to injure their enemies at a distance. This belief was once universal in the Western World, rose to strange and ghastly prominence in New England, and is still held by hundreds of thousands of ignorant white men, who conceal it carefully from their superiors, for fear of ridicule and of spiritual censure, but act on it occasionally with appalling violence. We have ourselves once or twice noticed cruel cases in England, especially that horrible one at Sible Hedingham in 1863, and, compared with the cases in Germany and. France, they are infrequent here. Despite the wide spread of the belief, however, and the frequent occasion it gives for judicial inquiry, no one, in England at all events, has of late years successfully traced its genesis. We cannot remember ever to have seen in the evidence of witnesses any hint either of their idea as to the source of the witches' power—though many of them, no doubt, ascribe it in their hearts to the Devil—or any explanation as to the means through which it is exercised. It is not even certain now-a-days whether the witch-baiters usually believe the power to be accidental, or born of an evil disposition, or directly derived from the protection and help of the Devil ; while as to the modus operandi, all is darkness. The " spells " of the witches do the mischief somehow, but how is a mystery past inquiry, and needless, even if it were possible to explain. In Guiana, however, the Indians all believe in witchcraft in a very strenuous way ; all have a definite theory as to witches' mode of action, and all, perhaps the most notable fact, think the same thing. They are all, probably, of one race, the original race of the American Indian ; but this belief has survived ages of separ- ation, during which languages have become utterly diverse in all but structure, arts have been acquired and lost, and violent differ- ences have arisen even as to the most elementary social laws. There are at least fifteen tribes, or groups of tribes, in Guiana, with separate languages and ways, but they all believe this. They all hold that the distinction between spirit and matter is absolute, that there cannot be matter without spirit, even if matter is not visibly sentient, and that the spirit in some persons and things, and under some conditions, can be detached from the " body " at will, and sent to do invisibly all it could do when united with the flesh or other substance. So rooted and con- sistent is this belief, that an Indian of Guiana holds his dreams to be realities, believes firmly that his spirit did see and suffer in fact what he saw and suffered in a dream, and will exact vengeance on his dearest friend for acts he saw him commit only in his own dreaming sleep. Mr. im Thurn, for instance, had a serious quarrel with one of his most useful attendants, a lad who affirmed and entirely believed that his master had com- pelled him to drag a canoe over rocks, while he—the lad—was suffering from fever. The impression could not be removed, and this was only one of numerous instances in which Mr. im Thurn was personally annoyed or impeded by the delusion :— " Moro than once, the men declared in the morning that some • Among the Indians in Guiana. By Everard im Thum. London: KOMI Paul, Trench. and Co. absent man, whom they named, had come during the night, and had beaten or otherwise maltreated them ; and they insisted upon much rubbing of the bruised parts of their bodies. Another instance was amusing. In the middle of one night I was awakened by an Arawak named Sam, the captain or headman of the Indians who were with me, only to be told the bewildering words, George speak me very bad, boss ; you cut his bits" It was some time before I could collect my senses sufficiently to remember that bits,' or fourpenny- pieces, are the units in which, among Creoles and semi-civilised Indians, calculation of money, and consequently of wages, is made ; that to cut bits means to reduce the number of bits, or wages, given ; and to understand that Captain Sam having dreamed that his sub- ordinate George had spoken insolently to him, the former, with a fine sense of the dignity of his office, now insisted that the culprit should be punished in real life."
Thus holding, the Indian as a necessary consequence holds that some persons can send out their spirits at will, and that when angry they will do it, with terrible results to the object of wrath. He calls such a person a "kenaima," a word originally applied by him to the person who in the Old Testament is called the "avenger of blood,"—that is, the man deputed by a family or tribe to avenge a wrong. The invisible kenaima, moved by personal hate or sense of wrong, or it may be mere tribal enmity, orders his spirit to hunt his foe ; and the spirit does it, and either administers poison, thereby causing disease —natural disease is inconceivable to the Indian—or passing into some animal, inflicts through it grievous injury, or, enter- ing into some material substance, compels that to enter the body of the victim and cause death, or produces some sort of pain. A toothache, for instance, would be caused by the invisible feather of some harmless bird, dominated by the spirit of an enemy, possibly a stranger, entering the tooth. In- deed, the kenaima need not even be a sentient enemy. These Indians, especially in the neighbourhood of Roraima, the inaccessible mountain of Guiana, which interests and ex- cites them, as it interests and excites all the naturalists of the world—who fancy that on its top, flora, or pos- sibly fauna, may exist unaffected by all external influences —believe that nothing material can exist unaccompanied by a spirit-equivalent. It follows from that idea, which is really worthy of Swedenborg, that an inanimate thing can feel wrath and punish ; that a huge tree or dolmen can send you torture, if you stare at it impertinently ; and that a sculptured rock may send you, when far away, and thinking yourself safe, a sentence of death. It can employ a harmless bird, for example, and can make a feather of that bird wound the victim mortally.
It is needless to say that the Indian victim to this strange belief, which to him seems not only logical, but demonstrable— for how else do you account for nightmares, or, indeed, for any dream P—is a melancholy man. Knowing of no reasonable cause for death, he attributes it to the kenaimas, and as he has no idea when they will act, he expects death as nearly always as human nature will admit; while as regards lesser injuries, no precaution—except one, to be mentioned by-and-by—can be effectual Anything, a stoat, a bird, a stone, a feather, may be animated by the kenaima's spirit, and may then exert the kenaima's full power of injury. There is no condition of place or circumstance ; and as to time, it is only needed that the kenaima, if sentient, be asleep—for if awake, he wants his spirit himself—and that condition is no protection. These Indians do not sleep at night as we do, but whenever they are sleepy ; lolling for weeks together in their hammocks, and usually breaking the night by long, but accidental and inter- mittent spells of talking, drinking—they drink pailsful of a "sour claret," made from the cassava root—and eating. They would,therefore, be the most hopelessly miserable of mankind,but that Nature has rebelled and taught them to invent the medicine man or peaiman, who by his ceremonials keeps off the kenaimas, and even when they have entered the body palpably and certainly —for else, why am I sick P—drives them away. The medicine man is carefully trained, really knows a few simples, and acquaints himself with the habits of game ; but his permanent reliance is on his power of producing a fearful and long. sustained noise, sometimes shaking the roof, on convul- sions, which he induces in himself by enormous draughts of tobacco-water, and on some early form of mesmerism. At least, we can read Mr. im Thorn's account in no other way. He was a favourite, and once when he was ill a medicine man offered to cure him. Mr. im Thera, though desperately out of sorts, like a true devotee of inquiry, leaped at the chance, and for six long hours passed much of his time in a half-trance, which must have been mesmeric. He was not cured or benefited in any way, but he is probably the only highly cultivated naturalist who ever submitted to an Indian medicine man's incantations ; and his account of them, and of the strange scene amidst which they were performed, is one of the most curious chapters in modern literature. We can quote only the final paragraphs, premising that the locale was the medicine man's own house, with some thirty persons all lolling in their hammocks, watching in the dark whether, the patient being white, anything unusual would happen :—
"It was a clever piece of ventriloquism and acting. The whole long terrific noise came from the throat of the peaiman ; or perhaps a little of it from that of his wife. The only marvel was that the man could sustain so tremendous a strain upon his voice and throat for six long hours. The rustling of the wings of the kenaimas, and the thud which was heard as each alighted on the floor, were imitated, as I afterwards found, by skilfully shaking the leafy boughs and then dashing them suddenly against the ground. The boughs, swept through the air close by my face, also produced the breezes which I had felt. Once, probably by accident, the boughs touched my face ; and it was then that I discovered what they were, by seizing and holding some of the leaves with my teeth. Once, too, toward the end of the performance and when I had lost nearly all consciousness, a hand was, I thought, laid upon my face. That, as will presently appear, was the crisis of my illness. The effect of all this upon me was very strange. Before long I ceased to bear the explanations of the boy by my side, and passed into a sort of fitful sleep or stupor, probably akin to mesmeric trance. Incapable of voluntary motion, I seemed to be suspended somewhere in a ceaselessly surging din ; and my only thoughts were a hardly-felt wonder as to the cause of the noise, and a gentle, fruitless effort to remember if there had once been a time before noise was. Now and then, when the noise all but died away for a few moments, during the intervals in which the peaiman was supposed to have passed out through the roof and to be heard from a great distance, I woke to half-consciousness. But always as he came back, and the noise grew again, I once more gradually fell into a state of stupor."
These men protect the Indians, who otherwise would die of the spiritual terrors caused by their own beliefs ; but, of course in their own interest, they do not pretend to protect them per- manently. They could not account for death, if they did, and would lose half their revenue.
We do not imagine that the ideas of the Indians of Guiana will throw much light on the witchcraft of oar own country, which has been thoroughly penetrated, and probably altered, by the belief in a personal Devil, with the attributes of the god Pan ; but if we knew the witchcraft of the Druidical period, we might find that a perception of the dual existence of man was the original cause of many horrible or apparently grotesque superstitions. At all events, it is most interesting to find. among a people once isolated a complete and, so to speak, in- telligent system of witchcraft, as hostile to man as European witchcraft, but palpably evolved by its votaries solely from watching their own natures, and drawing that deduction as to duality which the greatest philosophers have also drawn. These Indians deserve further study, for they appear to be the most primitive of all mankind whose thoughts on abstract subjects are intelligible to the white man, who fails more or leas to com- prehend men a little lower down, like the Australians, the Veddahs, and the Andamanese.
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