und. This belief
in the concrete force of words has had the most important effects
both in law and religion. The earliest codes of law were held to be
commands of the god and claimed obedience on this ground. The binding
force of the law rested in the words and not in the sense because the
words were held to be those of the god and to partake of his divine
nature. In ancient Rome the citizen had to take care to know the
words of the law and to state them exactly. If he used one wrong word
the law gave him no assistance. "Gaius tells a story of a man whose
neighbour had cut his vines; the facts were clear; he stated the law
applying to his case, but he said vines, whereas the law said trees;
he lost his suit." [115] The divine virtue attached to the sacred
books of different religions rests on the same belief. Frequently the
books themselves are worshipped, and it was held that they could not
be translated because the sanctity resided in the actual words and
would be lost if other words were used. The efficacy of spells and
invocations seems to depend mainly on this belief in the concrete
power of words. If one knows an efficacious form of words connoting
a state of physical facts and repeats it with the proper accessory
conditions, then that state of facts is actually caused to exist;
and if one knows a man's name and calls on him with a form of words
efficacious to compel attendance, he has to come and his spirit can
similarly be summoned from the dead. When a Malay wishes to kill an
enemy he makes an image of the man, transfixes or otherwise injures
it, and buries it on the path over which the enemy will tread. As he
buries it with the impression that he will thereby cause the enemy
to die and likewise be buried, he says:

It is not I who am burying him,
It is Gabriel who is burying him,

and thinks that the repetition of these words produces the state of
facts which they denote so that the guilt of the murder is removed from
his own shoulders to those of the archangel Gabriel. Similarly when he
has killed a deer and wishes to be free from the guilt of his action,
or as he calls it to cast out the mischief from the deer, he says:

It is not I who cast out these mischiefs,
It is Michael who casts them out.
It is not I who cast out these mischiefs,
It is Israfel who casts them out,

and so on, freeing himself in the same manner from responsibility
for the death of the deer. [116] Na