uritan regards
such forms of light swearing--"Mon Dieu," etc.--as are still tolerated
on the continent of Europe, but have disappeared from good society in
Puritanic England and America. The reader interested in this group of
ideas and customs may consult Tylor, Early History of Mankind, pp.
142, 363; Max Muller, Science of Language, 6th edition, Vol. II. p. 37;
Mackay, Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, Vol. I. p. 146.

Chamisso's well-known tale of Peter Schlemihl belongs to a widely
diffused family of legends, which show that a man's shadow has been
generally regarded not only as an entity, but as a sort of spiritual
attendant of the body, which under certain circumstances it may
permanently forsake. It is in strict accordance with this idea that not
only in the classic languages, but in various barbaric tongues, the
word for "shadow" expresses also the soul or other self. Tasmanians,
Algonquins, Central-Americans, Abipones, Basutos, and Zulus are cited by
Mr. Tylor as thus implicitly asserting the identity of the shadow with
the ghost or phantasm seen in dreams; the Basutos going so far as to
think "that if a man walks on the river-bank, a crocodile may seize his
shadow in the water and draw him in." Among the Algonquins a sick person
is supposed to have his shadow or other self temporarily detached from
his body, and the convalescent is at times "reproached for exposing
himself before his shadow was safely settled down in him." If the sick
man has been plunged into stupor, it is because his other self has
travelled away as far as the brink of the river of death, but not being
allowed to cross has come back and re-entered him. And acting upon a
similar notion the ailing Fiji will sometimes lie down and raise a hue
and cry for his soul to be brought back. Thus, continues Mr. Tylor, "in
various countries the bringing back of lost souls becomes a regular part
of the sorcerer's or priest's profession." [164] On Aryan soil we find
the notion of a temporary departure of the soul surviving to a late date
in the theory that the witch may attend the infernal Sabbath while her
earthly tabernacle is quietly sleeping at home. The primeval conception
reappears, clothed in bitterest sarcasm, in Dante's reference to his
living contemporaries whose souls he met with in the vaults of hell,
while their bodies were still walking about on the earth, inhabited by
devils.

The theory which identifies the soul with the shad