| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
§ 3. Many Manii
at Aricia |
| |
| WE are now able to suggest an explanation
of the proverb “There are many Manii at Aricia.” Certain loaves made
in the shape of men were called by the Romans maniae, and it
appears that this kind of loaf was especially made at Aricia. Now,
Mania, the name of one of these loaves, was also the name of the
Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, to whom woollen effigies of men and
women were dedicated at the festival of the Compitalia. These
effigies were hung at the doors of all the houses in Rome; one
effigy was hung up for every free person in the house, and one
effigy, of a different kind, for every slave. The reason was that on
this day the ghosts of the dead were believed to be going about, and
it was hoped that, either out of good nature or through simple
inadvertence, they would carry off the effigies at the door instead
of the living people in the house. According to tradition, these
woollen figures were substitutes for a former custom of sacrificing
human beings. Upon data so fragmentary and uncertain, it is
impossible to build with confidence; but it seems worth suggesting
that the loaves in human form, which appear to have been baked at
Aricia, were sacramental bread, and that in the old days, when the
divine King of the Wood was annually slain, loaves were made in his
image, like the paste figures of the gods in Mexico, and were eaten
sacramentally by his worshippers. The Mexican sacraments in honour
of Huitzilopochtli were also accompanied by the sacrifice of human
victims. The tradition that the founder of the sacred grove at
Aricia was a man named Manius, from whom
many Manii were descended, would thus be an etymological myth
invented to explain the name maniae as applied to these
sacramental loaves. A dim recollection of the original connexion of
the loaves with human sacrifices may perhaps be traced in the story
that the effigies dedicated to Mania at the Compitalia were
substitutes for human victims. The story itself, however, is
probably devoid of foundation, since the practice of putting up
dummies to divert the attention of ghosts or demons from living
people is not uncommon. |
1 |
| For example, the Tibetans stand in fear of
innumerable earth-demons, all of whom are under the authority of Old
Mother Khön-ma. This goddess, who may be compared to the Roman
Mania, the Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, is dressed in
golden-yellow robes, holds a golden noose in her hand, and rides on
a ram. In order to bar the dwelling-house against the foul fiends,
of whom Old Mother Khön-ma is mistress, an elaborate structure
somewhat resembling a chandelier is fixed above the door on the
outside of the house. It contains a ram’s skull, a variety of
precious objects such as gold-leaf, silver, and turquoise, also some
dry food, such as rice, wheat, and pulse, and finally images or
pictures of a man, a woman, and a house. “The object of these
figures of a man, wife, and house is to deceive the demons should
they still come in spite of this offering, and to mislead them into
the belief that the foregoing pictures are the inmates of the house,
so that they may wreak their wrath on these bits of wood and to save
the real human occupants.” When all is ready, a priest prays to Old
Mother Khön-ma that she would be pleased to accept these dainty
offerings and to close the open doors of the earth, in order that
the demons may not come forth to infest and injure the household. |
2 |
| Again, effigies are often employed as a means of
preventing or curing sickness; the demons of disease either mistake
the effigies for living people or are persuaded or compelled to
enter them, leaving the real men and women well and whole. Thus the
Alfoors of Minahassa, in Celebes, will sometimes transport a sick
man to another house, while they leave on his bed a dummy made up of
a pillow and clothes. This dummy the demon is supposed to mistake
for the sick man, who consequently recovers. Cure or prevention of
this sort seems to find especial favour with the natives of Borneo.
Thus, when an epidemic is raging among them, the Dyaks of the
Katoengouw River set up wooden images at their doors in the hope
that the demons of the plague may be deluded into carrying off the
effigies instead of the people. Among the Oloh Ngadju of Borneo,
when a sick man is supposed to be suffering from the assaults of a
ghost, puppets of dough or rice-meal are made and thrown under the
house as substitutes for the patient, who thus rids himself of the
ghost. In certain of the western districts of Borneo if a man is
taken suddenly and violently sick, the physician, who in this part
of the world is generally an old woman, fashions a wooden image and
brings it seven times into contact with the sufferer’s head, while
she says: “This image serves to take the place of the sick man; sickness, pass over into the image.” Then,
with some rice, salt, and tobacco in a little basket, the substitute
is carried to the spot where the evil spirit is supposed to have
entered into the man. There it is set upright on the ground, after
the physician has invoked the spirit as follows: “O devil, here is
an image which stands instead of the sick man. Release the soul of
the sick man and plague the image, for it is indeed prettier and
better than he.” Batak magicians can conjure the demon of disease
out of the patient’s body into an image made out of a banana-tree
with a human face and wrapt up in magic herbs; the image is then
hurriedly removed and thrown away or buried beyond the boundaries of
the village. Sometimes the image, dressed as a man or a woman
according to the sex of the patient, is deposited at a cross-road or
other thoroughfare, in the hope that some passer-by, seeing it, may
start and cry out, “Ah! So-and-So is dead”; for such an exclamation
is supposed to delude the demon of disease into a belief that he has
accomplished his fell purpose, so he takes himself off and leaves
the sufferer to get well. The Mai Darat, a Sakai tribe of the Malay
Peninsula, attribute all kinds of diseases to the agency of spirits
which they call nyani; fortunately, however, the magician can
induce these maleficent beings to come out of the sick person and
take up their abode in rude figures of grass, which are hung up
outside the houses in little bell-shaped shrines decorated with
peeled sticks. During an epidemic of small-pox the Ewe negroes will
sometimes clear a space outside of the town, where they erect a
number of low mounds and cover them with as many little clay figures
as there are people in the place. Pots of food and water are also
set out for the refreshment of the spirit of small-pox who, it is
hoped, will take the clay figures and spare the living folk; and to
make assurance doubly sure the road into the town is barricaded
against him. |
3 |
| With these examples before us we may surmise that
the woollen effigies, which at the festival of the Compitalia might
be seen hanging at the doors of all the houses in ancient Rome, were
not substitutes for human victims who had formerly been sacrificed
at this season, but rather vicarious offerings presented to the
Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, in the hope that on her rounds
through the city she would accept or mistake the effigies for the
inmates of the house and so spare the living for another year. It is
possible that the puppets made of rushes, which in the month of May
the pontiffs and Vestal Virgins annually threw into the Tiber from
the old Sublician bridge at Rome, had originally the same
significance; that is, they may have been designed to purge the city
from demoniac influence by diverting the attention of the demons
from human beings to the puppets and then toppling the whole uncanny
crew, neck and crop, into the river, which would soon sweep them far
out to sea. In precisely the same way the natives of Old Calabar
used periodically to rid their town of the devils which infested it
by luring the unwary demons into a number of lamentable scarecrows,
which they afterwards flung into the river. This interpretation of
the Roman custom is supported to some extent by the evidence of Plutarch, who speaks of
the ceremony as “the greatest of purifications.” |
4 |
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