39. All who have any acquaintance with the folk-lore of the world are aware that the notion of men and women having the power to change themselves into beasts is as wide as superstition itself and older than history. It is mentioned in the pages of Herodotus and in the myths of ancient Assyria. It is the property of African negroes, and the peasantry of Europe still hold to their faith in the reality of the were-wolf of Germany, the loup-garou of France and the lupo mannaro of Italy. Dr. Richard Andrée well says in his interesting study of the subject: "He who would explain the origin of this strange superstition must not approach it as a national or local manifestation, but as one universal in its nature; not as the property of one race or family, but of the species and its psychology at large."[139]
Even
in such a detail as the direct connection of the name of the person
with his power of change do we find extraordinary parallelisms between
the superstition of the red man of America and the peasant of Germany.
As in Mexico the nagual was assigned to the infant by a form of baptism,
so in Europe the peasants of east Prussia hold that if the godparent
at the time of naming and baptism thinks
of a wolf, the infant will acquire the power of becoming one; and in
Hesse to pronounce the name of the person in the presence of the animal
into which he has been changed will restore him to human shape.[140]
40. I need not say that the doctrine of personal spirits is not especially Mexican, nor yet American; it belongs to man in general, and can be recognized in most religions and many philosophies. In ancient Greece both the Platonicians and later the Neo-Platonicians thought that each individual has a particular spirit, or daimōn in whom is enshrined his or her moral personality. To this daimōn he should address his prayers, and should listen heedfully to those interior promptings which seem to arise in the mind from some unseen silent monitor.[141]
Many a member of the Church of Rome substitutes for the daimōn of the Platonists the patron saint after whom he is named, or whom he has chosen from the calendar, the hagiology, of his Church. This analogy did not fail to strike the early missionaries, and they saw in the Indian priest selecting the nagual of the child a hideous and diabolical caricature of the holy rites.
But
what was their horror when they found that the similarity proceeded
so far that the pagan priest also performed a kind of baptismal sacrament
with water; and that in the Mexican picture-writing the sign which represents
the natal day, the tonal, by which
the individual demon is denoted, was none other than the sign of the
cross, as we have seen. This left no doubt
as to the devilish origin of the whole business, which was further supported
by the wondrous thaumaturgic powers of its professors.
41. How are we to explain these marvelous statements? It will not do to take the short and easy road of saying they are all lies and frauds. The evidence is too abundant for us to doubt that there was skillful jugglery among the proficients in the occult arts among those nations. They could rival their colleagues in the East Indies and Europe, if not surpass them.
Moreover, is there anything incredible in the reports of the spectators? Are we not familiar with the hypnotic or mesmeric conditions in which the subject sees, hears and feels just what the master tells him to feel and see? The tricks of cutting oneself or others, of swallowing broken glass, of handling venomous reptiles, are well-known performances of the sect of the Aissaoua in northern Africa, and nowadays one does not have to go off the boulevards of Paris to see them repeated. The phenomena of thought transference, of telepathy, of clairvoyance, of spiritual rappings, do but reiterate under the clear light of the close of the nineteenth century the mystical
[139] See his article "Wer-wolf," in his Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergieiche, p. 62, seq.
[140] Richard Andrée, ibid., ss. 63, 64.
[141] See Alfred Maury, La Magie et Astroloqie, pp. 88, 89, 267, etc.
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