The Making of Religion

question of our evidence, which is all-important. We proceed to defend it. The accounts from primitive peoples original: "savage" are on the level of much anthropological evidence; they may, that is, be dismissed by opponents as ‘travelers’ tales.’ But the best testimony for the truth of the reports regarding actual belief in the facts is the unintended coincidence of evidence from all ages and regions.¹ When the stories brought by travelers—ancient and modern, learned and unlearned, religious or skeptical—agree in the main, we have all the certainty that anthropology can offer. Again, when we find practically the same strange, neglected sparks—not only rumored in European popular superstition, but attested in many hundreds of first-hand depositions made by respectable modern witnesses, who are educated and responsible—we cannot honestly or safely dismiss the coincidence of these reports as indicating a mere ‘survival’ of primitive original: "savage" superstitious belief, and nothing more.

It is agreed that we can no longer do so in the case of hypnotic phenomena. I hope to make it seem possible that we should not do so regarding the hallucinations provoked by gazing into a smooth depth, usually called ‘crystal-gazing.’ Ethnologically, this practice is at least as old as classical times and has a practically world-wide distribution. I shall prove its existence in Australia, New Zealand, North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and among the Incas, not to mention the Middle Ages and recent European history. The universal idea is that such visions may be ‘clairvoyant.’ To take a Polynesian case, ‘resembling the Hawaiian wai harru.’ When anyone has been robbed, the priest, after praying, has a hole dug in the floor of the house and filled with water. Then he gazes into the water, ‘over which the god is supposed to place the spirit of the thief. . . . The

¹ Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 9, 10.