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AMULETS: PRIMITIVE, MODERN 361
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Revised Version, but the literal meaning is "houses of the soul (orlife)."22
The
natives of southwestern Australia regard shining stones with so much
veneration that only sorcerers or priests are believed to be worthy to
handle them, and so great is the faith in the innate power of such
objects that any ordinary native does not dare to touch them and cannot
even be bribed so to do. For the preservation of the virtue of these
stones it is considered essential that no woman shall be permitted to
touch them, or even to look upon them. A particular form of talisman is
made by winding lengths of opossum yarn about a fragment of quartz, of
carnelian, of chalcedony, or some other attractive stone, and thus
forming a round ball about the size of a crochet-ball; these are worn
suspended from the girdle. Talismans of this type are very highly
prized for their supposed power to cure diseases, and in case of
illness a tribe which is not provided with one will borrow it from a
more fortunate tribe.23 "White quartz is used by the natives
in New South Wales, Australia, for the manufacture of a charm to cast
a spell over an enemy. This charm is called mult, and consists
of a fragment of white quartz to which a piece of opossum-fur has been
gummed ; it must then be smeared with the fat of a dead body and placed
in a slow-burning fire. It is confidently believed that the person over
whom the spell is cast wastes slowly away and dies.24
Jade carvings of an exceedingly peculiar type are the hei-tikis (neck-ornaments)
greatly prized among the Maoris of New Zealand. The grotesque
representation of the human form here realized by the native carvers,
the association of
*J.
G. Frazer, " Balder the Beautiful," London, 1913, vol. ii, p. 155. See
also by the same writer, " Folk-lore in the Old-Testament," in
Anthropological Essays, presented to E. B. Tyler, Oxford, 1907, pp.
148 sqq.
" Sir George Grey, " Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery," London, 1841, vol. ii, pp. 340, 341.
M Bonney, Journ. of the Antbrop, Inst., vol. xiii, p. 130.
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