voluntary punishment. But originally
there seems little reason to doubt that it was adopted for a different
purpose. It was valued not because the fasting person felt that he had
done anything for which it was necessary to repent, but because it was
believed to bring people into closer touch with the spiritual world.
There is, of course, a very obvious reason for this belief. A lowered
vitality is favourable to hallucinations of every description. A
shipwrecked sailor is placed, by no act of his own, in precisely the
same condition as is the primitive medicine man or the medieval saint by
his own volition. It has always been recognised, and by none more
readily than by the great religious teachers of the world, that a
well-nourished body is inimical to what they chose to term "spiritual
development." The historic Christian outcry against fleshly indulgence
has much more in it than a revolt against mere sensualism. A well-fed
body has been deprecated because it closed the avenue to spiritual
illumination. Hence it is that fasting has found such favour in all
religious systems. The ascetic saw more because, by reducing the body to
an abnormal state, he provided the conditions for seeing more. The Zulu
maxim, "A stuffed body cannot see secret things," really expresses in a
sentence the philosophy of the matter.

Among the Blackfoot Indians of North America, when a boy reaches puberty
he is sent away from his father's lodge in search of a spiritual
protector or totem. Seeking a secluded spot, he abstains from food until
he is favoured in a dream with a vision of some animal or bird, which is
at once adopted by him.[29] This custom obtains with most of the North
American tribes. Among these tribes, also, the soothsayer prepares
himself by fasting for the ecstatic state in which the spirits give
their messages through him. The ordinary member of the tribe who wants
anything will fast until he is assured in a dream that it will be
granted him. Similarly, the Malay, to procure supernatural intercourse,
retires to the jungle and abstains from food. The Zulu doctor prepares
for intercourse with the tribal spirits by spare diet or solitary fasts.
Fasting is part of the ordinary regimen of the Hindu yogi. Of certain
Indian tribes we are told that before proceeding on an expedition they
"observe a rigorous fast, or rather abstain from every kind of food for
four days. In this interval their imagination is exalted to delirium;
whethe