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A lock of the
sufferer's hair was pegged into an oak; then by a sudden wrench he
left his hair and his ague behind him in the tree.


LVI. The Public Expulsion of Evils

1. The Omnipresence of Demons
IN THE FOREGOING chapter the primitive principle of the transference
of ills to another person, animal, or thing was explained and
illustrated. But similar means have been adopted to free a whole
community from diverse evils that afflict it. Such attempts to
dismiss at once the accumulated sorrows of a people are by no means
rare or exceptional; on the contrary they have been made in many
lands, and from being occasional they tend to become periodic and
annual.
It needs some effort on our part to realise the frame of mind which
prompts these attempts. Bred in a philosophy which strips nature of
personality and reduces it to the unknown cause of an orderly series
of impressions on our senses, we find it hard to put ourselves in
the place of the savage, to whom the same impressions appear in the
guise of spirits or the handiwork of spirits.


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