Charms Are Made For Every Occupation And Desire In Life - Loving,
Hating, Buying, Selling, Fishing, Planting, Travelling, Hunting,
Etc., And
Although they are usually in the form of things filled
with a mixture in which the spirit nestles, yet there
Are other
kinds; for example, a great love charm is made of the water the
lover has washed in, and this, mingled with the drink of the loved
one, is held to soften the hardest heart.
Some kinds of charms, such as those to prevent your getting drowned,
shot, seen by elephants, etc., are worn on a bracelet or necklace.
A new-born child starts with a health-knot tied round the wrist,
neck, or loins, and throughout the rest of its life its collection
of charms goes on increasing. This collection does not, however,
attain inconvenient dimensions, owing to the failure of some of the
charms to work.
That is the worst of charms and prayers. The thing you wish of them
may, and frequently does, happen in a strikingly direct way, but
other times it does not. In Africa this is held to arise from the
bad character of the spirits; their gross ingratitude and
fickleness. You may have taken every care of a spirit for years,
given it food and other offerings that you wanted for yourself,
wrapped it up in your cloth on chilly nights and gone cold, put it
in the only dry spot in the canoe, and so on, and yet after all
this, the wretched thing will be capable of being got at by your
rival or enemy and lured away, leaving you only the case it once
lived in.
Finding, we will say, that you have been upset and half-drowned, and
your canoe-load of goods lost three times in a week, that your
paddles are always breaking, and the amount of snags in the river
and so on is abnormal, you judge that your canoe-charm has stopped.
Then you go to the medicine man who supplied you with it and
complain. He says it was a perfectly good charm when he sold it you
and he never had any complaints before, but he will investigate the
affair; when he has done so, he either says the spirit has been
lured away from the home he prepared for it by incantations and
presents from other people, or that he finds the spirit is dead; it
has been killed by a more powerful spirit of its class, which is in
the pay of some enemy of yours. In all cases the little thing you
kept the spirit in is no use now, and only fit to sell to a white
man as "a big curio!" and the sooner you let him have sufficient
money to procure you a fresh and still more powerful spirit -
necessarily more expensive - the safer it will be for you,
particularly as your misfortunes distinctly point to some one being
desirous of your death. You of course grumble, but seeing the thing
in his light you pay up, and the medicine man goes busily to work
with incantations, dances, looking into mirrors or basins of still
water, and concoctions of messes to make you a new protecting charm.
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