man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively, like a table or a hat at a modern spirit seance.’[1] Now M. Lefebure has pointed out (in ‘Melusine’) that, according to De Brosses, the African conjurers gave an appearance of independent motion to small objects, which were then accepted as fetishes, being visibly animated.  M. Lefebure next compares, like Mr. Tylor, the alleged physical phenomena of spiritualism, the flights and movements of inanimate objects apparently untouched.

The question thus arises, Is there any truth whatever in these world-wide and world-old stories of inanimate objects acting like animated things?  Has fetishism one of its origins in the actual field of supernormal experience in the X region?  This question we do not propose to answer, as the evidence, though practically universal, may be said to rest on imposture and illusion.  But we can, at least, give a sketch of the nature of the evidence, beginning with that as to the apparently voluntary movements of objects, not untouched.  Mr. Tylor quotes from John Bell’s ‘Journey in Asia’ (1719) an account of a Mongol Lama who wished to discover certain stolen pieces of damask.  His method was to sit on a bench, when ’he carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried him, to the very tent’ of the thief.  Here the bench is innocently believed to be self-moving.  Again, Mr. Rowley tells how in Manganjah the sorcerer, to find out a criminal, placed, with magical ceremonies, two staffs of wood in the hands of some young men.  ’The sticks whirled and dragged the men round like mad,’ and finally escaped and rolled to the feet of the wife of a chief, who was then denounced as the guilty person.[2]

Mr. Duff Macdonald describes the same practice among the Yaos:[3]

’The sorcerer occasionally makes men take hold of a stick, which, after a time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.’

The process is just that of Jacques Aymard in the celebrated story of the detection of the Lyons murderer.[4]

In Melanesia, far enough away, Dr. Codrington found a similar practice, and here the sticks are explicitly said by the natives to be moved by spirits.[5] The wizard and a friend hold a bamboo stick by each end, and ask what man’s ghost is afflicting a patient.  At the mention of the right ghost ‘the stick becomes violently agitated.’  In the same way, the bamboo ‘would run about’ with a man holding it only on the palms of his hands.  Again, a hut is built with a partition down the middle.  Men sit there with their hands under one end of the bamboo, while the other end is extended into the empty half of the hut.  They then call over the names of the recently dead, till ‘they feel the bamboo moving in their hands.’  A bamboo placed on a sacred tree, ’when the name of a ghost is called, moves of itself, and will lift and drag people about.’  Put up into a tree, it would lift them from the ground.  In other cases the holding of the sticks produces convulsions and trance.[6] The divining sticks of the Maori are also ’guided by spirits,’[7] and those of the Zulu sorcerers rise, fall, and jump about.[8]