< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu
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IDOL-WORSHIP AND FETICH-WORSHIP.

the Malagasy, Ellis testifies that friends of the prince, on seeing a photograph of him, took off their hats to it and verbally saluted it.

That which holds of a pictorial representation holds of a carved or sculptured one—holds even more naturally; since the carved representation, being solid, approaches closer to the reality. Where the image is painted and has eyes inserted, this notion of participation in the vitality of the person imitated becomes, in the uncritical mind of the savage, very strong. Any one who remembers the horror a child shows on seeing an adult put on an ugly mask, even when the mask has been previously shown to it, may conceive the awe which a rude effigy excites in the primitive mind. The sculptured figure of the dead man arouses the thought of the actual dead man, which passes into a conviction that he is present.

And why should it not? If the other-self can leave the living body and reenter it; if the ghost can come back and animate afresh the dead body; if the embalmed Peruvian, presently to be resuscitated by his wandering double, was then to need his carefully-preserved hair and nails; if the soul of the Egyptian, after its transmigrations, occupying some thousands of years, was expected to infuse itself once more into his mummy—why should not a spirit go into an image? A living body differs more from a mummy in texture than a mummy does from wood.

That a savage does think an effigy is inhabited we have abundant proofs. Lander, describing the Yorubans, says a mother carries for some time a wooden figure of her lost child, and, when she eats, puts part of her food to its lips. The Samoiedes, according to Bastian, "feed the wooden images of the dead." The relatives of an Ostyak

"make a rude wooden image, representing, and in honor of, the deceased, which is set up in the yurt, and receives divine honors for a greater or less time, as the priest directs. . . . At every meal they set an offering of food before the image; and, should this represent a deceased husband, the widow embraces it from time to time. . . . This kind of worship of the dead lasts about three years, at the end of which time the image is buried."

Erman, who states this, adds the significant fact that the descendants of deceased priests preserve the images of their ancestors from generation to generation—

"and, by well-contrived oracles and other arts, they manage to procure offerings for these their family penates, as abundant as those laid on the altars of the universally-acknowledged gods. But that these latter also have an historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished men, to which prescription and the interests of the Shamans gave by degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to doubt."

These Ostyaks, indeed, show us unmistakably how worship of the dead man's effigy passes into worship of the divine idol; for the two are identical. At each meal, placing the dishes before the household

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