tly careful to guard
the knowledge of their true names from others, being content to be
addressed and spoken of by a nickname, or a substituted epithet. The
reason of this is that the knowledge of another's name confers power
over that other: it is as though he, or at least an essential part of
him, were in the possession of the person who had obtained the knowledge
of his name. It is perhaps not an unfair deduction from the same
premises that endows an image with the properties of its prototype--nay,
identifies it with its prototype. This leads on the one hand to
idol-worship, and on the other hand to the rites of witchcraft wherein
the wizard is said to make a figure of a man, call it by his name, and
then transfix it with nails or thorns, or burn it, with the object of
causing pain and ultimately death to the person represented. Nor is a
very different process of thought discernible in the belief that by
eating human or other flesh the spirit (or at any rate some of the
spiritual qualities) formerly animating it can be transferred to the
eater. So a brave enemy is devoured in the hope of acquiring his
bravery; and a pregnant woman is denied the flesh of hares and other
animals whose qualities it is undesirable her children should have.

To minds guiltless of inductive reasoning an accidental coincidence is a
sure proof of cause and effect. Travellers' tales are full of examples
of misfortunes quite beyond foresight or control, but attributed by the
savages among whom the narrators have sojourned to some perfectly
innocent act on their part, or merely to their presence, or to some
strange article of their equipment. Occasionally the anger of the gods
is aroused by these things; and missionaries, in particular, have
suffered much on this account. But sometimes a more direct causation is
imagined, though it is probably not always easy to distinguish the two
cases. Omens also are founded upon accidental coincidences. The most
lively imagination may fail to trace cause and effect between the
meeting of a magpie at setting out and a fruitless errand following, or
between a certain condition of the entrails of an animal sacrificed and
a victory or defeat thereafter. But the imagination is not to be beaten
thus. If the magpie did not cause failure, at all events it foretold it;
and the look of the entrails was an omen of the gain or loss of the
battle.

Again, a merely fanciful resemblance is a sufficient association to
es