There the
limbs of the victims were broken and they were left to die a
lingering death in the enemy's country, being too crippled to crawl
back to Uganda. The disease or plague was thought to have been thus
transferred to the victims and to have been conveyed back in their
persons to the land from which it came.
Some of the aboriginal tribes of China, as a protection against
pestilence, select a man of great muscular strength to act the part
of scapegoat. Having besmeared his face with paint, he performs many
antics with the view of enticing all pestilential and noxious
influences to attach themselves to him only. He is assisted by a
priest. Finally the scapegoat, hotly pursued by men and women
beating gongs and tom-toms, is driven with great haste out of the
town or village. In the Punjaub a cure for the murrain is to hire a
man of the Chamar caste, turn his face away from the village, brand
him with a red-hot sickle, and let him go out into the jungle taking
the murrain with him. He must not look back.
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
THE MEDIATE expulsion of evils by means of a scapegoat or other
material vehicle, like the immediate expulsion of them in invisible
form, tends to become periodic, and for a like reason.
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