Chapter 5 Sympathetic Witchcraft: Homeopathic or Mimic Witchcraft

In various ages many men have attempted to injure or destroy their enemies by destroying or destroying their idols.They believe that the enemy will be wounded at the same time his idol is wounded, and that he will die at the same time his idol is destroyed.This is probably the most common application of the principle "like breeds like".It is only necessary to cite a few examples from a large number of facts to show how widespread and how long this custom has spread throughout the world.The practice was known to the wizards of ancient India, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece and Rome thousands of years ago, and it is still practiced today by cunning and malicious people in Australia, Africa, and Scotland.We have also heard of a similar practice among the North American Indians: they draw someone's likeness on sand, ashes, dirt, or anything else that Stab it or inflict some other form of damage.By doing so, they believed, the person represented in the portrait would be harmed accordingly.For example: When an Ojibwe Indian seeks to do harm to someone, he makes a puppet in the image of the enemy, and then sticks a needle into his head or heart, or shoots arrows into it.He believed that when he pierced or shot through the idol, the corresponding part of the enemy's body would immediately feel severe pain. If he wanted to kill the person immediately, he would burn or bury the puppet while reciting spells; Man fashions out of fat and flour the image of a person whom he hates or fears, and burns it in the way that victim will pass, which they call "burning the soul."

The Malays have a similar spell: if you want to kill someone, first you have to collect a representative of each part of his body, such as nail clippings, hair, eyebrows, saliva and so on.Then, beeswax was taken from the empty nests of bees, they were glued together to make a wax figure of the person, and the wax figure was slowly baked over a lamp flame for seven consecutive nights.When baking, you should also repeat: "What I burn is not wax. What I burn is so-and-so's spleen, heart, and liver!" After the wax figure is burned on the seventh night, the person you want to murder will die.This kind of magic obviously combines the principles of "homeopathic witchcraft" and "contact witchcraft"; because the idol made is to imitate an enemy, and the nails, hair, saliva, etc. on the idol have touched his own body. thing.In this way, the crime of murder will fall on the shoulders of the Archangel Gabriel, and let him bear the blame, which is of course much stronger than your own responsibility.

"Homeopathic" or "simulated" witchcraft is usually performed using idols for the hateful purpose of driving hateful people out of the world, but it has also been used for good wishes to help others come to this world. world, although this is relatively rare.In other words, it has also been used to induce or impregnate infertile women.In the Batak people of Sumatra, an infertile woman made a puppet baby and held it on her lap in order to become a mother, believing that it would make her wish come true.In the Babur Islands, when a woman wanted to have a child, she invited a father who had many children to pray for her to the sun god Eupelero.He first made a doll out of red cotton, and let the woman hold her tightly in her arms, as if she was breastfeeding.Then he took a chicken, held it up by its legs, and held it over the woman's head, saying: "Ah! Eupelero, please eat this chicken! Please give me a child! I beseech you, I I beseech you, let a child be born in my hands and on my lap!" Then he asked the woman, "Has the baby come?" and she replied, "Yes, it is already suckling." Here Later, the man held the chicken on her husband's head and prayed with words.Finally, the chicken is killed and placed on the family altar along with some betel leaves.After the ceremony, word was sent to the village that the woman had gone to bed to give birth, and her girlfriends came to congratulate her.Here, the rite of pretending to give birth to a child is a genuine witchcraft rite, imitated or imitated in the hope that a child will actually be born.But to increase the efficacy of this ceremony, prayers and sacrifices were added.In other words, magic is strengthened by mixing religion with it.

Among the Dayak people in Borneo, when a woman has difficulty in childbirth, a wizard is called to handle the body of the parturient woman with a rational attitude and skillful techniques to midwifery; while another wizard is outside the door, but with We think it's a completely absurd way to achieve the same thing.In fact, he was pretending to be the pregnant woman, putting a big stone on his stomach, wrapping himself in a cloth to show the baby was in the womb, and shouting at him like the wizard at the real surgery site Acting on shouted instructions, he moved the fake baby on his body, mimicking the restlessness of the real baby in the mother's womb, until the baby was born.

One of the great advantages of homeopathic witchcraft is that the healing process can be carried out and completed on the doctor instead of the patient: as long as the patient sees his doctor rolling on the ground pretending to be in extreme pain in front of him, he will relieve the disease. All the ailments and troubles.For example, farmers in Perch, France, believed that the patient's persistent vomiting and convulsions were caused by the "unhooking" of the stomach in the stomach.Therefore, a doctor was called in to restore this organ to its original position.When the doctor sees a patient vomiting, he immediately performs some of the most terrible contortions in order to "unhook" his own stomach, and when this effort is successful, he performs other "hooks" in order to re-hook the stomach. "hook" contortions and scowling movements.At the same time, the patient correspondingly experiences a relief from pain, for which he pays five francs.Similarly, when a Dayak physician was called in to treat an illness, he lay down and pretended to be dead.So he was treated as a corpse, wrapped in a mat, carried outside the house and placed on the ground.About an hour later another physician undid the mat and revived the feigned dead man; and when he came back to life the patient seemed to recover as well.

Moreover, homeopathic magic and all of sympathetic magic played an important part in the various measures taken by the ancient hunters and fishermen in order to obtain abundant food.On the principle that "like begets like," there are many things they do to closely simulate the results they seek, and on the other hand there are many things they carefully avoid because they are more or less Imagined to be similar to things that might actually cause harm. The reader may have noticed that in some of the above examples of taboo, the influence of witchcraft was supposed to work at a considerable distance.For example, among the Blackfoot Indians, when a falconer is away, his wife and children are not allowed to use the awl, lest the eagle's claws hurt their husband or father who is far away.Nor could any male animal be killed in the home of a Malagasy soldier at the front, lest the death of the animal bring the death of the man.This belief in the existence of sympathy between people or things at a distance is the essence of witchcraft.Magic has not the slightest doubt about this power at a distance, as science may have.One of the first principles of witchcraft is the belief in telepathy.The modern account of mind-to-mind telepathy at a distance has no difficulty in being believed by savages.The savage was convinced of this a long time ago, and has a certain logical consistency when he acts on his belief.So far as I know, his modern civilized brethren have not been so devout in their actions to this belief.The savages believed that witchcraft had an effect not only on people or things far away during the ritual of magic, but also on the simplest actions of everyday life.Therefore, at important moments, the behavior of friends or relatives far away is often restricted by a more or less detailed convention or rule.It is believed that if one party ignores it, it will invite disaster or even death to the other party who goes out.Especially when a group of men were out hunting or fighting, their relatives at home were often required to do certain things or not to do others in order to ensure the success and safety of these distant hunters or warriors.Below I will provide some examples of this magical telepathy, both positive and negative.

In Laos, when an elephant hunter set out to track an elephant, he warned his wife not to cut her hair or anoint her with oil while he was away.Because if she cuts her hair, the elephant will break through the net; if she rubs oil, the elephant will slip out of the net; Come on, those who stay at home are not allowed to touch oil and water with their hands. If they do so, the hunters' arms will become unable to hold things, and the prey will slip away from them. Elephant hunters in East Africa believe that if their wives misbehave when they are away, the elephant hunters will be weaker than the elephants and will be killed or seriously injured by the elephants.Therefore, if a hunter hears that his wife is at fault, he abandons the hunt and returns home.If a Wagogo [an indigenous tribe in East Africa, living in the east of Lake Tanganyika, belongs to the Rift branch of the Bantu tribe. ] hunter failed or was attacked by a lion, he blamed his wife's escapades at home and went home in a rage.While he was out hunting, his wife could not let anyone pass behind her or stand in front of her while she was sitting, and she had to lie face down on the bed.The Moxos Indians of Bolivia believed that if a hunter's wife was unfaithful to him while he was out, he would be bitten by a boa constrictor or a jaguar.Therefore, if such an accident should happen, the woman would be punished, and often killed, whether innocent or guilty; An unfaithful wife, or an unfaithful sister, would keep him from killing a beaver.

Sometimes, with false tact, the principles of homeopathic or imitative witchcraft are applied to obtain a timely and plentiful harvest of fruit trees and crops.A flax grower in Thuringia [a region in central Germany] carries his seed in a bag that reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and walks with strides that swing the bag back and forth on his back.This is said to cause the flax grown to sway in the wind.In the interior of Sumatra, rice is sown by women, who deliberately let their long hair fall loose over their backs in order to make the rice grow tall and dense; similarly, in ancient Mexico, there was a ceremony dedicated to It is held in honor of the Goddess of Maize.The locals call her "Long-haired Mama".The celebration begins at such a moment: "When the crop has grown, the flower whiskers emerge from the green spikes to show people that the grain is full. On this festival, women let go of their long hair and let it stand in the This is the most prominent image in the celebration, so that the ears of maize will grow equally abundant and dense in the coming year, so that the corn will grow correspondingly large and full, so that everyone can have a good harvest.” Landing, dancing, and jumping into the air have all been shown to be a "following" pattern to make crops grow taller.For example, in France, in a region in the east of France], people say, "You have to dance like crazy at Mardi Gras for the marijuana to grow taller."

This conception that man can influence plants favorably by his actions or conditions has been very clearly illustrated by the behavior of a Malay woman.When asked why she cut the rice topless, she explained that it was done to make the husks thinner and she was tired of pounding the thick husks.Evidently, she was thinking that the less clothes she wore, the thinner the husk would become.Bavarian and Austrian farmers were familiar with the magical effect of using pregnant women to transmit fertility.They think that if the first fruit of a fruit tree is eaten by a woman who is pregnant with a child, the tree will surely bear fruit in the coming year.On the other hand, Baganda [residents of the Buganda region in Uganda, East Africa.The Ugandan branch of the Bantu people. ] people believed that a barren wife would affect the fruit-bearing trees in her husband's orchard by her own lack of fertility.Thus a childless woman was usually abandoned by her husband; the Greeks and Romans even offered pregnant women as sacrifices to the goddesses of corn and land, no doubt to make the land fertile and the ears of corn full.When the Orinoco Indians made their women hold babies in their arms and sow seeds in the fields in the hot sun, when the Catholic priests accused them of this, the men replied, "Father, you don't understand these things, and that's why you are angry. You know women are used to having children, but we men are not. If the women go to sow, there will be two or three ears of corn on the stalk, two or three baskets of yucca roots, and everything Multiply, why? Because if women know how to bear children, they also know how to make the seeds they sow bear fruit. Let them sow! We men don't know so much about these things as they do .”

Therefore, according to the theory of "homeopathic witchcraft": man can affect the growth of plants, and decides whether his influence is good or bad according to his behavior or state.For example, fertile women make plants fertile, while barren women make plants barren.The belief that certain human qualities and actions can be harmful and contagious has given rise to many taboos: people are forbidden to do certain things lest their own unpleasant state or situation will affect the yield of the land favorably.All such restrictions or prohibitions are instances of negative witchcraft or taboo.For example, due to the belief that human actions or states have that quality of what may be called "sensing," the Galera [indigenous people on the island of Halmahera in Indonesia] say: "You must never shoot an arrow under a fruit tree, Otherwise, the tree will also drop its fruit like an arrow to the ground; also, when you eat watermelon, you should not mix the seeds you spit out of your mouth with the seeds you put aside to plant, otherwise , although the melon seeds you spit out will grow and bloom, the flowers will fall to the ground just like the melon seeds you spit out. The same line of thought led the Bavarian farmer to believe that if he accidentally grafted a root If the branch of the fruit tree falls to the ground, then when the branch grows into a fruit tree, it will let its own fruit fall before it matures; when the Cham people in Cochin China sow upland rice, they are most afraid of showers, so they swallow the rice dry to prevent rain damage to crops.

In the above instance, a person is believed to have a homeopathic influence on the growth of plants.He directs and influences plants with his good or bad qualities and actions to similar results.But according to the principles of homeopathic magic, the influence is reciprocal: a certain plant can affect a certain person, just as a certain person can affect a certain plant to the same extent.In witchcraft, as we believe in the laws of physics: action and reaction are equal and opposite.The Cherokee [a tribe of the Iroquois Indians of North America] Indians were veterans of vegetal homeopathy.They have a kind of wild sweet pea whose roots are so tough they almost stop the plowshare in the furrow.So Cherokee women washed their hair with a decoction of the root to strengthen it, and Cherokee players bathed in it to strengthen their muscles.The Galera believe in such things as this: if you eat a fruit that falls on the ground, you yourself will be infected and prone to trip; burnt in a banana, or burnt a banana in a fire) and you will become forgetful; the Galera also holds the opinion that if a woman eats two bananas growing on a bunch of bananas, Banana, she will give birth to a pair of twins.The Guarani Indians in South America believed that if a woman ate the two grains that grew together, she would become the mother of twins.In Vedic times there was a strange application of this principle, which provided a spell to restore an exiled monarch to his throne: he had to eat sap that had been cooked on the fire from the regrowth of the roots of the felled tree. food.The resilience displayed by the tree will be passed on to the sovereign through fire and food in sequence.The Sudanese also believe that if a house is built of thorny wood, the life of the people who live in such a house will be correspondingly as difficult as walking on a road full of thorns. In China, certain complex spells were resorted to to ensure longevity.These spells themselves concentrate the essence of all kinds of witchcraft from time to season, from people to things that the homeopathic principle has.There is nothing better than a shroud [according to the old Chinese customs, the clothes that are prepared for the living old people to wear after death are called shrouds. ] would be a more appropriate example.Many Chinese had their shrouds prepared while they were alive, and most had their shrouds cut and sewn by unmarried girls or very young women.People are wise enough to consider their young age, and when sewing the shrouds, some of their vigorous vitality must be passed on to these shrouds, thus delaying their real use for many years.In addition, such shrouds are made in years with leap months.Because, in the eyes of the Chinese, since the years with leap months are unusually long, they also have the ability to prolong life. It is obviously better to make shrouds in such years.Of these garments there is a robe which is the most delicately made, in order to endow it with the most precious qualities.It is a dark blue long silk gown, with many Chinese characters for "shou" embroidered with gold silk from top to bottom.The Chinese believe that giving such an extravagant gown to an aging parent is a sign of filial piety and concern from the children to their parents.The old man often wears this dress that prolongs his life, especially on festive occasions, so that the dress with many golden longevity characters can fully exert its effect.Especially on his birthday, he will never forget to wear it, because in China, it is generally blessed that a person stores a lot of energy on his birthday, which will be transformed into his health and prosperity in the days after that year. vitality.At the birthday celebration, he put on this gorgeous costume, absorbed the blessings it infected with every pore, and accepted the blessings of relatives and friends triumphantly.And they enthusiastically expressed their admiration for the fine clothes and the filial piety towards his descendants.It is this kind of filial piety that motivates younger generations to present such beautiful and functional gifts to their parents. The Chinese also have a belief, from which we can see the application of the principle of "like breeds like".The Chinese believe that the fortunes of a city are greatly affected by the shape of the walls, and that they must adapt them properly to the characteristics of that which closely resembles the shape of the city.For example, it is said that a long time ago, the city outline of Quanzhou Prefecture was shaped like a carp, while that of Yongchun County, which is adjacent to it, was shaped like a fishing net.Therefore, Quanzhou Prefecture often became a victim of the plunder of Yongchun County. It was not until the residents of Quanzhou Prefecture came up with a way: to build two pagodas in the center of the city that this bad luck ended.This is because the two pagodas towering over the city prevent the imaginary net from descending to catch the imaginary carp, and thus have the most beautiful influence on the fortunes of the city.About 40 years ago, the wise men of Shanghai discovered a local rebellion brewing and were deeply concerned about it.After careful investigation, it was discovered that the cause of the disturbance was that a newly built temple was unfortunately shaped like a tortoise, and a tortoise is a very vile animal.But if it is torn down and rebuilt, it will be blasphemy and cause disasters, and if it remains in the shape of a turtle, it will cause similar or even more terrible disasters.The difficulty is serious and the danger is imminent.At this critical juncture, the fortune tellers in the area had an idea and successfully found a good way to avoid a disaster.They filled up the two wells representing the tortoise's eyes, and the notorious animal was immediately blinded, and could no longer make trouble.Sometimes homeopathic or simulated witchcraft is also used in simulated fashion to wash away certain omens of disaster.The method is to replace the real disaster with a fake disaster to bypass bad luck.