were said to go to a prison of darkness under the earth; 1 according to the beliefs of the Banks' Islanders they were excluded from the true Panoi or Paradise. On the Gold Coast, "if a man had property stolen from his house, he might go to the priest of the local deity he was accustomed to worship, state the loss that had befallen him, make an offering of a fowl, rum, and eggs, and ask the priest to supplicate the god to punish the thief." " In Southern Guinea fetishes are inaugurated to detect and punish certain kinds of theft, and persons who are cognisant of such crimes and do not give information about them are also liable to be punished by the fetish. The Bechuanas speak of an unknown being, vaguely called by the name of Lord and Master of things (Mongalinto), who punishes theft. One of them said:"When it thunders every one trembles; if there are several together, one asks the other with uneasiness, Is there any one amongst us who devours the wealth of others? All then spit on the ground saying, We do not devour the wealth of others. If a thunderbolt strikes and kills one of them, no one complains, no one weeps; instead of being grieved, all unite in saying that the Lord is delighted (that is to say, he has done right) with killing that man; we also say that the thief eats thunderbolts, that is to say, does things which draw down upon men such judgments." According to the Zoroastrian Yasts, Rashnu Razista was "the best killer, smiter, destroyer of thieves and bandits." In ancient Egypt property was under the protection of the god Ptah. In Greece Zeus KTHσLos was a guardian of the family property; and according to a Roman tradition the domestic god repulsed the robber and kept off the enemy." The removing of land 8 marks has frequently been regarded as sacrilegious. It was strictly prohibited by the religious law of the Hebrews.2 In Greece boundaries were protected by Zeus oplos. Plato says in his Laws':-"Let no one shift the boundary line either of a fellow-citizen who is a neighbour, or, if he dwells at the extremity of the land, of any stranger who is conterminous with him. . . . Every one should be more willing to move the largest rock which is not a landmark, than the least stone which is the sworn mark of friendship and hatred between neighbours; for Zeus, the god of kindred, is the witness of the citizen, and Zeus, the god of strangers, of the stranger, and when aroused terrible are the wars which they stir up. He who obeys the law will never know the fatal consequences of disobedience, but he who despises the law shall be liable to a double penalty, the first coming from the Gods, and the second from the law." The Romans worshipped Terminus or Jupiter Terminalis as the god of boundaries. According to an old tradition, Numa directed that every one should mark the bounds of his landed property by stones consecrated to Jupiter, that yearly sacrifices should be offered to them at the festival of the Terminalia, and that, "if any person demolished or displaced these bound-stones, he should be looked upon as devoted to this god, to the end that anybody might kill him as a sacrilegious person with impunity and without being defiled with guilt." In the higher religions theft of any kind is frequently condemned as a sin. This religious sanction given to ownership is no doubt in some measure due to the same circumstances as, in certain cases, make morality in general a matter of divine 1 Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, p. 166 $99. 2 Deuteronomy, xix. 14; xxvii. 17. Proverbs, xxii. 28; xxiii. 10 sq. Hosea, V. 10. Cf. Job, xxiv. 2. 3 Plato, Leges, viii. 842 sq. Demosthenes, Oratio de Halonneso, 39, p. 86. See also Hermann, Disputatio de terminis eorumque religione apud Græcos, passim. • Ovid, Fasti, ii. 639 sqq. Festus, De verborum significatione, Termino.' Lactantius, Divine Institutiones, i. 10 (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, vi. 227 sqq.). Pauly, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft, vi. pt. ii. 1707 sqq. Fowler, Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic, p. 324 sqq. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanæ, ii. 74. Plutarch, Numa, xvi. I. Festus, op. cit. 'Ter mino.' concern-a subject which will be dealt with in a future chapter. But there are also special reasons which account for it. Partly it has its origin in magic practices, particularly in the curse. 2 Cursing is a frequent method of punishing criminals who cannot be reached in any other way. In the Book of Judges we read of Micah's mother who had pronounced a curse with reference to the money stolen from her, and afterwards, when her son had confessed his guilt, hastened to render it ineffective by a blessing. In early Arabia the owner of stolen property had recourse to cursing in order to recover what he had lost.3 In Samoa "the party from whom anything had been stolen, if he knew not the thief, would seek satisfaction in sitting down and deliberately cursing him." The Kamchadales "think they can punish an undiscovered theft by burning the sinews of the stonebuck in a publick meeting with great ceremonies of conjuration, believing that as these sinews are contracted by the fire so the thief will have all his limbs contracted." 5 Among the Ossetes, if an object has been secretly stolen, its owner secures the assistance of a sorcerer. They proceed together to the house of any person whom they suspect, the sorcerer carrying under his arm a cat, which is regarded as a particularly enchanted animal. He exclaims, "If thou hast stolen the article and dost not restore it to its owner, may this cat torment the souls of thy ancestors!" And such an imprecation is generally followed by a speedy restitution of the stolen property. Again, if their suspicions rest upon no particular individual, they proceed in the same manner from house to house, and the thief then, knowing that his turn must come, frequently confesses his guilt at A common mode of detecting the perpetrator of a theft is to compel the suspected individual to make oath, once. 1 See, e.g., Mason, in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xxxvii. pt. ii. 149 (Karens). 2 Judges, xvii. 2. 3 Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, p. 192. Turner, Nineteen Years in Poly nesia, p. 318. Krasheninnikoff, History of Kamschatka, p. 179 sq. 6 von Haxthausen, Transcaucasia, p. 398 sq. that is to say, to pronounce a conditional curse upon himself.1 3 In Cursing is resorted to not only for the purpose of punishing thieves or compelling them to restore what they have stolen, but also as a means of preventing theft. the South Sea Islands it is a common practice to protect property by making it taboo, and the tabooing of an object is, as Dr. Codrington puts it, "a prohibition with a curse expressed or implied." The curse is then, in many cases, deposited in some article which is attached to the thing or place it is intended to protect. The mark of taboo, in Polynesia called rahui or raui, sometimes consists of a cocoa-nut leaf plaited in a particular way, sometimes of a wooden image of a man or a carved post stuck in the ground, sometimes of a bunch of human hair or a piece of an old mat," and so forth. In Samoa there were various forms of taboo which formed a powerful check on stealing, especially from plantations and fruit-trees, and each was known by a special name indicating the sort of curse which the owner wished would fall on the thief. Thus, if a man desired that a sea-pike should run into the body of the person who attempted to steal, say, his bread-fruits, he would plait some cocoa-nut leaflets in the form of a seapike, and suspend it from one or more of the trees which he wanted to protect. This was called the "sea-pike taboo"; and any ordinary thief would be terrified to touch a tree from which this was suspended, believing that, if he did so, a fish of the said description would dart up and mortally wound him the next time he went to the sea. The "white shark taboo" was done by plaiting a cocoa-nut leaf in the form of a shark, and was tantamount to an 1 von Struve, in Das Ausland, 1880, p. 796 (Samoyedes). Worcester, Philippine Islands, p. 412 (Mangyans of Mindoro). Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 292 sq. (Samoans). Bosman, op. cit. p. 125 (Negroes of the Gold Coast). Bowdich, Mission to Ashantee, p. 267 ; &c. Codrington, Melanesians, p. 215. Soc. i. 275. 4 Hamilton, Maori Art, p. 102; Thomson, Story of New Zealand, i. 102; Polack, op. cit. ii. 70 (Maoris). Ellis, Polynesian Researches, iii. 116 (Tahitians). Thomson, op. cit. i. 102 (Maoris). See also Colenso, op. cit. p. 34(Maoris); Ellis, Polynesian Researches, iii. 201 (Tahitians). expressed imprecation that the thief might be devoured by the white shark when he went to fish. The "cross-stick taboo," again, consisted of a stick suspended horizontally from the tree, and meant that any thief touching the tree would have a disease running right across his body and remaining fixed there till he died. Exactly equivalent to the taboo of the Pacific Islanders is the pomali of the natives of Timor; "a few palm leaves stuck outside a garden as a sign of the pomali will preserve its produce from thieves as effectually as the threatening notice of mantraps, spring-guns, or a savage dog, would do with us." 2 Among the Santals, whenever a person " is desirous of protecting a patch of jungle from the axes of the villagers, or a patch of grass from being grazed over, or a newly sown field from being trespassed upon, he erects a bamboo in his patch of grass or field, to which is affixed a tuft of straw, or in the case of jungle some prominent and lofty tree has the same prohibitory mark attached, which mark is well understood and strictly observed by all parties interested.” 3 So also in Madagascar "on rencontre sur les chemins, on voit dans les champs de longs bâtons munis à leur sommet d'un paquet d'herbes et qui sont plantés en terre soit pour interdire le passage du terrain soit pour indiquer que les récoltes sont réservées à l'usage d'individus déterminés.' Among the Washambala the owner of a field sometimes. puts a stick wound round with a banana leaf on the road to it, believing that anybody who without permission enters the field "will be subject to the curse of this charm." 5 The Wadshagga protect a doorless hut against burglars by placing a banana leaf over the threshold, and any maliciously inclined person who dares to step over it is supposed to get ill or die." The Akka "stick an arrow in a bunch of bananas still on the stalk to mark it as their own 1 Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 294 sqq. 2 Wallace, Malay Archipelago, p. 149 sq. 3 Sherwill, Tour through the Ráj. mahal Hills,' in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xx. 568. 4 "4 van Gennep, Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar, p. 184 sqq. 5 Lang, in Steinmetz, Rechtsverhält nisse, p. 263. 6 Volkens, op. cit. p. 254. |