ssence of his victim; he
stuck a pile in the ground, he spread the soul-stuff on the pile; then
he pretended to wound himself on the pile and to groan with pain.
Anybody can see for himself that by a natural and necessary
concatenation of causes this compelled the poor fellow to stumble over
that jagged bamboo stump and to perish miserably. Again, take the case
of a hunter in the forest who is charged and ripped up by a wild boar.
On a superficial view of the circumstances it might perhaps occur to you
that the cause of death was the boar. But you would assuredly be
mistaken. The real cause of death was again a sorcerer, who pounded up
the soul-stuff of his victim with a boar's tooth. Again, suppose that a
man is bitten by a serpent and dies. A shallow rationalist might say
that the man died of the bite; but the Kai knows better. He is aware
that what really killed him was the sorcerer who took a pinch of his
victim's soul and bunged it up tight in a tube along with the sting of a
snake. Similarly, if a woman dies in childbed, or if a man hangs
himself, the cause of death is still a sorcerer operating with the
appropriate means and gestures. Thus to make a man hang himself all that
the sorcerer has to do is to get a scrap of his victim's soul--and the
smallest scrap is quite enough for his purpose, it may be a mere shred
or speck of soul adhering to a hair of the man's head, to a drop of his
sweat, or to a crumb of his food,--I say that the sorcerer need only
obtain a tiny little bit of his victim's soul, clap it in a tube, set
the tube dangling at the end of a string, and go through a pantomime of
gurgling, goggling and so forth, like a man in the last stage of
strangulation, and his victim is thereby physically compelled to put his
neck in the noose and hang himself in good earnest.[438]

[Sidenote: Danger incurred by the sorcerer.]

Where these views of sorcery prevail, it is no wonder that the sorcerer
is an unpopular character. He naturally therefore shrinks from publicity
and hides his somewhat lurid light under a bushel. Not to put too fine a
point on it, he carries his life in his hand and may be knocked on the
head at any moment without the tedious formality of a trial. Once his
professional reputation is established, all the deaths in the
neighbourhood may be set down at his door. If he gets wind of a plot to
assassinate him, he may stave off his doom for a while by soothing the
angry passions of his enemies