mbodia, India, North America (Eskimo), South America
(Peru),[281] and there are survivals in modern Europe. In China this
wholesale expulsion is still practiced in a very elaborate form.[282]
Among the Ainu, it is said, on the occasion of any accident the "spirit
of accidents" (a useful generalization) is driven away by the
community.[283] In these cases the spirits are thought of as being in a
sort corporeal, sensitive to blows, and also as afraid of noise. There
is sometimes a combination of natural and supernatural conceptions:
while the violent expulsive process is going on the household utensils
are vigorously washed by the women; washing, known to cleanse from mere
physical dirt, here also takes on, from its association with the men's
ceremony of expulsion, a supernatural potency--it removes the injurious
mana of the hostile spirits.

+141+. Less violent methods of riddance may be employed. Evil, being a
physical thing, may be embodied in some object, nonhuman or human, which
is then carried forth or sent away to some distant point, or destroyed.
With this principle of transference may be compared the conception of
solidarity of persons and things in a tribe or other community: what one
unit does or suffers affects all--the presence of an accursed thing with
one person brings a curse on his nation,[284] and conversely, the
removal of the evil thing or person removes the curse, which may, under
certain circumstances, be shifted to some other place or person.

+142+. The particular method of expulsion or transference is
immaterial.[285] The troublesome evil may be carted or boated away
according to local convenience, or it may depart in the person of an
animal. Leprous taint is transferred to a bird, which, having been
dipped in the blood of a sacred animal, is allowed to fly away carrying
the taint off from the community.[286] Even moral evils (sin) may thus
be got rid of. In the great Hebrew annual ceremony of atonement not only
the ritual impurity of the sanctuary and the altar, but also the sin of
the nation, is laid on a goat and sent away to the wilderness demon,
Azazel.[287]

+143+. Examples of human apotropaic vehicles occur in the ancient
civilized world. In the Athenian Thargelia the Pharmakos was supposed to
bear in his person crimes and evils, and was driven forth from the
city.[288] The same conception is found, perhaps, in the Roman Mamuralia
and Lupercalia. In the first of these Mamertius is driven