Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/298
278 ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
closely than we do, with no other razor than one of wood or stone.
They believe their souls to be immortal, and that they who have deserved well of the gods have their abode in that quarter of the heavens where the sun rises; the accursed, in the Occident. They have I know not what kinds of priests and prophets, who very rarely come among the people, hav- ing their abode in the mountains. On their arrival a great festival and solemn assemblage of several villages takes place. (Each building such as I have described is a village, and they are about a French league distant one from an- other.) The prophet speaks to them in public, inciting them to virtue and to their duty; but their whole -moral-teaching contains only these two articles: resoluteness in war and affection for their wives. He prophesies things to come and the results they may hope for from their undertakings; shows them the way toward war, or dissuades them from it; but all this is under the condition that, when he fails to prophesy truly, and if it chances them otherwise than he predicted to them, he is chopped into a thousand pieces if they catch him, and condemned as a false prophet. For this reason, he who has once erred is never seen again. (c) Divi- nation is a gift of God; that is why the misuse of it should be a punishable imposture. Among the Scythians, when the ' soothsayers failed in their venture, they were laid, loaded with chains, in carts filled with brushwood and drawn by oxen, in which they were burned alive.! Those who manage things subject to the guidance of human knowledge are ex- cusable if they do with them what they can; but these others, who come cheating us with assurances of an extra- ordinary power which is beyond our ken — must not they be punished, both because they do not carry out the fact of their promise, and for the foolhardiness of their imposture?
(a) They wage wars against the tribes that live on the other side of their mountains, farther inland, to which they go entirely naked, with no other weapons than bows, or wooden swords pointed at the end like the heads of our boar spears. The obstinacy of their combats is wonderful, and they never end save with slaughter and bloodshed; for as to
1 See Herodotus, IV, 69.
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