A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s3.25

v1.c8.s3.25

which bring disease and misfortune upon mankind, ghostly beings, against whom the wizard hurls his wild curses, or whom he tries to soothe and banish by flattering speeches. Indeed, many of these magic songs, like the magic rites pertaining to them, belong to a sphere of conceptions which, spread over the whole earth, ever recur with the most surprising similarity in the most varying peoples of all countries. Among the Indians of North America, among the Negro races of Africa, among the Malays and Mongols, among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and frequently still among the peasantry of present-day Europe, we find again exactly the same views, exactly the same strange leaps of thought in the magic songs and magic rites, as have come down to us in the Atharvaveda of the ancient Indians. There are, then, numerous verses in the Atharvaveda, which, according to their character and often also their contents, differ just as little from the magic formulas of the American-Indian medicine-men and Tartar shamans, as from the Merseburg magic maxims, which belong to the sparse remains of the oldest German poetry. Thus we read, for example, in one of the Merseburg magic incantations that "Wodan, who well understood it," charmed the sprained leg of Balder's foal with the formula: