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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 398 of 705
Words from 110179 to 110444
of 194943
