The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this

       festival the women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial,

       in order that the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain might be correspondingly large and flat, and that the

       people might have abundance." In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in the air are approved homoeopathic modes of

       making the crops grow high. Thus in Franche-Comte they say that you should dance at the Carnival in order to make the hemp grow

       tall.

       The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically by his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Ma-lay woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to make the rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding thick-husked rice. Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she wore the less

       husk there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts, the men answered, "Father, you don't understand these things, and that is why they vex you. You know that women are

       accustomed to bear children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them sow, then; we men don't know as much about it as they do."

       Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren.

       Hence this belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the

       earth with their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative

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       magic or taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground; and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from that graft will let its fruit fall untimely. When the Chams of Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no shower should fall, they eat their rice dry in order to prevent rain from spoiling the crop.

       In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with qualities or accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from his own. But on the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence is mutual:

       the plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are

       equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the catgut

       plant are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in the furrow. Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction

       of the roots to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players wash themselves with it to toughen their muscles. It is a Galelareese

       belief that if you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground, you will yourself contract a disposition to stumble and fall; and that if

       you partake of something which has been forgotten (such as a sweet potato left in the pot or a banana in the fire), you will become

       forgetful. The Galelareese are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two bananas growing from a single head she would

       give birth to twins. The Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would become a mother of twins if she ate a

       double grain of millet. In Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm by which a banished prince might be

       restored to his kingdom. He had to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown out of the stump of a tree

       which had been cut down. The recuperative power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated through the fire

       to the food, and so to the prince, who ate the food which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew out of

       the tree. The Sudanese think that if a house is built of the wood of thorny trees, the life of the people who dwell in that house will

       likewise be thorny and full of trouble.

       There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear

       nor speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind, deaf and dumb by the use of dead men's bones or anything

       else that is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among the Galelareese, when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes a little

       earth from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house just above the place where her parents sleep. This, he fancies,

       will prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved, since the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as

       the dead. Burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this species of magic, which is very useful to them in the exercise

       of their profession. Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a dead man's bone over the

       house, saying, with pungent sarcasm, "As this bone may waken, so may these people waken"; after that not a soul in the house can

       keep his or her eyes open. Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a grave and sprinkles it round the house which he intends

       to rob; this throws the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a Hindoo will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the

       house; Indians of Peru scatter the dust of dead men's bones; and Ruthenian burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone,

       pour tallow into it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house with this candle burning, which causes the inmates

       to sleep a death-like sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone and play upon it; whereupon all persons

       within hearing are overcome with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent purpose the left fore-arm of a

       woman who had died in giving birth to her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With it they beat the ground before they entered

       the house which they designed to plunder; this caused every one in the house to lose all power of speech