private redress was forbidden. For a long time it seemed that the freeman's prerogative was being taken from him. As long as the duel survives the movement is incomplete. 555. Origin of criminal law. When the state took control of injuries and acts of violence and undertook to revenge them on behalf of the victims, as well as in vindication of public authority and order, injuries became crimes and revenge became punishment. Crimes were injuries which could be compensated for, and also violations of the king's peace, that is, of public welfare. In the latter point of view they brought the king's vanity into play. The German emperor Frederick II, by his ferocity against rebels, showed how potent wounded vanity is, as a motive, even in an able man. The crime of treason or rebellion always excites the vanity and fierce revenge of civil authority. It is beyond question that the state in its penalties simply took over the usages of kin groups in inflicting retaliation or gratifying revenge. It did not philosophize. It assumed functions, and with them it took the methods of procedure and the instrumentalities which it found in use for those functions. Criminal law, therefore, and criminal administration were developed out of blood revenge when it was rendered rational and its traditional processes were subjected to criticism. CHAPTER XIV UNCLEANNESS AND THE EVIL EYE Demonism and the aleatory interest. - Universality of primitive demonism. Uncleanness. Female uncleanness. - Uncleanness in ethnography. Uncleanness in higher religions. Uncleanness amongst Jews. Uncleanness amongst Greeks. These customs produced modesty and the subordination of women. — Uncleanness, holiness, devotedness. The evil eye; jettatura. — The evil eye in ethnography. — Amulets against the evil eye. Devices against the evil eye. Insult and vituperation against the evil eye.Interaction of the mores and the evil eye. -- 556. Demonism and the aleatory interest. Uncleanness and the evil eye are dogmatic notions, products of demonism. The dogmas are arbitrary. A corpse is unclean and makes any one unclean who touches it. A baby is not unclean. The evil eye brings bad luck, not pain or disease. Uncleanness and the evil eye have each a field. Neither is of universal application. The mores, starting out from primitive demonism, produced these two dogmas as an adjustment of experience and observation to demonism. Uncleanness is a very rude and primary expression of the unsanitary and contagious. It undoubtedly often happens that calamity befalls in the hour of success and rejoicing. A number of people were trodden to death on the Brooklyn bridge when it was opened. A few centuries ago, and in all ancient times, such an incident would have been accepted as the obvious chastisement of the superior powers on the overweening pride of men. The same might be said of the death of Mr. Huskisson at the opening of the first railroad. The sum of such incidents stands in some relation to fundamental superstitions about demons, if such are believed. The incidents can be fitted into the doctrines very easily. The whole aleatory interest is a field for this kind of general dogmas of the application of fundamental principles to classes of cases. The folkways, deeply concerned in the aleatory interest, work out the applications. 557. Universality of primitive demonism. Demonism is the broadest and most primitive form of religion. All the higher religions show a tendency to degenerate back to it. Brahminism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism, and mediæval Christianity show this tendency. Greek religion is most remarkable because we find in Homer very little demonism. It appears, therefore, that in his time primitive demonism had been overcome. In the fifth century B.C. we find it coming in again, and in the fourth century it became the ruling form of popular religion. It predominated in late Greek religion, mixed with demonism from western Asia and Egypt, and passed to Rome, where it entered into primitive Christianity, combining with highly developed demonism from rabbinical Judaism. Religion always arises out of the mores. Changes in religion are produced by changes in the mores. Religious ideas, however, in the next stage, are brought back to the mores as controlling dogmas. The product of the first stage becomes the seed in the second. Goblinism and demonism have great effect on the mores, probably because demonism is so original and universal in all religions, and so popular in its hold on the minds of all. Demonism furnishes devices of magic, sorcery, sortilege, divination, augury, oracles, etc., by which it is believed that men can get from the superior powers (spirits, demons, etc.) what they want, and can learn what is to be in the future. It therefore has the greatest apparatus by which to satisfy human needs, as they appear under the demonistic interpretation of the world and human life. The most important immediate and direct consequences of demonism in the second stage, when it is brought back to the work of life as a normative system, are the notions of uncleanness and of the evil eye. 558. Uncleanness. The notion of uncleanness is ritual. It is not entirely irrational. Contagious diseases and diseases which are the result of ignorance and neglect of sanitation give sense to the notion. The interpretation of those phenomena as due to the intervention of superior powers is like the interpretation of other diseases as due to demons. In fact, uncleanness is a step towards a rational view of disease, because it brings in secondary causes, and puts the action of demons one step further off. The effect of uncleanness was that it made the affected person unfit and unable to perform ritual acts on which human welfare was supposed to depend. The affected person became dangerous to others, and was forced to banish himself from societal contact with them. He was also cut off from access to the superior powers. It was therefore indispensable that he should recover cleanness in order to carry on his life. The recovery was accomplished through ritual acts and devices, and chiefly through the intervention of shamans, who were experts in the rites and devices required. 559. Female uncleanness. The ritual notion of uncleanness, being a product of deduction from demonistic world philosophy, was arbitrary, and was capable of indefinite extension. It was not a disease, was not held to facts by symptoms of pain, etc. Women were held to be unclean, and causes of uncleanness by contact, at marriage, menstruation, and childbirth. They were always possessed by demons, which accounted for their special functions as mothers. The periods mentioned were periods of special activity of the demonistic function. The belief was common in the Orient that a woman was dangerous to her husband at marriage. A demon left her at that time in the nuptial bloodshed. At menstruation women were dangerous to men. The ritual idea of uncleanness was so extended that women were put under a kind of imprisonment for a time, especially in the Zoroastrian system (sec. 561), in order to remove them from social contact. At child bearing also they were forced into retirement for a specified period.1 Corpses also were unclean and made all those unclean who came into contact with them. There are numerous other and comparatively trifling causes of ritual. uncleanness.2 560. Uncleanness in ethnography. The Macusi of British Guiana forbid women to bathe during the period, and also forbid them to go into the forest, for they would risk bites from enamored snakes. If a woman of the Ngumba, in Kamerun, bears a dead child, the uncleanness is double. She 2 Ibid., xiii, xiv, xv. 8 Schomburgk, Brit. Guiana, II, 316. 1 Levit. xii. 5 may not touch the hand of a man until she is unwell again.1 In Madagas car no one who had been at a funeral might enter the palace, or approach the sovereign, for a month, and no corpse might be buried in the capital city. The mourners washed their dresses, or dipped a portion of them in running water, as a ritual purification. The Tshi peoples of West Africa cause women to retire, at the period, to huts prepared for the purpose in the bush, because they are at that time offensive to the deities. The Ewespeaking peoples think a mother and baby unclean for forty days after childbirth. The Bechuanas, when they have touched a corpse, dug a grave, or are near relatives of a deceased person, the ritual uncleanness being thus extended to a wider circle of those in any way concerned in a burial, — purify themselves by prescribed ritualistic washings, put on new garments and cut their hair, or purify themselves with the smoke of a fire into which magic-working materials have been cast. On returning from battle they ceremonially wash themselves and their weapons. The Karoks of California think that if a menstruating woman approaches any medicine which is about to be given to a sick man she will cause his death. The Tamils think that saliva renders ritually unclean whatever it touches. Therefore, in drinking, they pour the liquid down the throat without touching the cup to the lips. The Romans held that nothing else had such marvelous efficacy as, or more deadly qualities than, the menstrual flow. Here we find that which is, in one view, evil and contemptible, regarded, in another view, as powerful and worthy of respect. The Arabs thought that "a great variety of natural powers" attached themselves to a woman during the period. The gum of the acacia was thought to be a clot of menstrual blood. Therefore it was an amulet. The tree is a woman.10 At the great feast of the dead amongst the Eskimo on Bering Straits the feast makers make wiping motions, stamp, and slap the thighs, in order to "cast off all uncleanness that might be offensive to the shades," and thus to render their sacrifices acceptable." The spirits amongst the Kwakiutl, Chinooks, and their neighbors kill an unclean man. These people have fastings and washings for purification. 12 561. Uncleanness in higher religions. In the higher religions the same notions of ritual cleanness were retained and developed. Pious Zoroastrians could not travel by sea without great inconvenience, because they could not help defiling the natural element water, which they were forbidden to do.13 They were forbidden to blow a fire with the breath, lest they should 1 Globus, LXXXI, 337. 2 Sibree, Great Afr. Island, 290. 7 Gehring, Süd-Indien, 96. 8 Pliny, Hist. Nat., VII, 64. 9 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 448. 11 Bur. Eth., XVIII, Part I, 371. 18 Darmsteter, Zend-Avesta, I, xxxiv. |