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In three remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the seer is tied up in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.
In 1707 it appeared in Iceland, and carried off more than one-fourth of its inhabitants; in 1733, according to Collinson, it almost depopulated Greenland. The Samoyeds, Ostiaks, and other natives of Eastern Siberia, have frequently suffered from devastating epidemics. In Kamchatka the disease was introduced in 1767, and many villages were completely depopulated.
Professor Max Muller has still, moreover, to explain how the process of corruption which introduced the same fetichistic practices among Samoyeds, Brazilians, Kaffirs, and the people of the Atharvana Veda came to be everywhere identical in its results. Here an argument often urged against the anthropological method may be shortly disposed of.
Seers are chosen in Zululand, as among Eskimos and Samoyeds, from the class which in Europe supplies the persons who used to be, but are no longer the most favourite hypnotic subjects, 'abnormal children, epileptic and hysterical.
Not knowing how to dispose of her, the Russian police consigned her to a nunnery at the mouth of the Obi. Her lover, in a yacht, found her hiding-place, and got a friendly nun to give her some narcotic known to the Samoyeds. It was the old truc of the Friar in "Romeo and Juliet." At the mouth of the Obi they do not bury the dead, but lay them down on platforms in the open air.
The most powerful wizards are they whose external souls have the shape of stallions, elks, black bears, eagles, or boars. Again, the Samoyeds of the Turukhinsk region hold that every shaman has a familiar spirit in the shape of a boar, which he leads about by a magic belt.
As for the undeniable phenomenon that, in every land, age, and condition of culture, and in every stage of belief or disbelief, some observers have persistently asserted their experience of these occurrences; as for the phenomenon that the testimonies of Australian blacks, of Samoyeds, of Hurons, of Greeks, of European peasants, of the Catholic and the Covenanting clergy, and of some scientifically trained modern physicians and chemists, are all coincident, official physical science leaves these things to anthropology and folklore.
What is the origin of this element, so prominent in the religion of Egypt, and present, if less conspicuous, in the most ancient temples of Greece? It is the survival, answers De Brosses, of ancient practices like those of untutored peoples, as Brazilians, Samoyeds, Negroes, whom the Egyptians and Pelasgians once resembled in lack of culture. This, briefly stated, is the hypothesis of De Brosses.
In like manner, the Samoyeds, after shooting a bear, will gather about the body offering excuses and laying the blame on the Russians; and the American redskin will even put the pipe of peace into the dead animal's mouth, and beseech him to forgive the deed.
Trevor Battye saw the Samoyeds doing to the Brent geese on Kolguev Island. Thousands were driven into a kind of kraal, and killed for winter food. Next to the pelagic sealer, the whalers and ordinary seal-hunters are the worst scourges of the animal world. They killed off, for instance, every single one of the Antarctic right whales, and nearly all the Cape and Antarctic fur seals.
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