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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: VIR-WAT |
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VOW (Lat. votum, vow, promise: cf. VOTE) , a transaction between a man and a god; whereby the former undertakes in the future to render some service or gift to the god or devotes something valuable now and here to his use. The god on his part is reckoned to be going to grant or to have granted already some special
It would be an abuse of language to apply the term vow to the uses of imitative magic, e.g. to the action of a barren woman among the Battas of Sumatra, who in order to become a mother makes a wooden image of a child and holds it in her lap. For in such rites no prominence is given to the ideaeven if it existsof a personal relation between the petitioner and the supernatural power. The latter is, so 'to speak, mechanically constrained to act by the spell or magical rite; the forces liberated in fulfilment, not of a petition, but of a wish are not those of a conscious will, and therefore no thanks are due from the wisher in case he is successful. The deities, however, to whom vows are made or discharged are already personal beings, capable of entering into contracts or covenants with man, of understanding the claims which his vow establishes on their benevolence, and of valuing his gratitude; conversely, in the taking of a vow the petitioner's piety and spiritual attitude have begun to outweigh those merely ritual details of the ceremony which in magical rites are all-important. Sometimes the old magical usage survives side by side with the more developed idea of a personal power to be approached in prayer. For example, in the Maghrib (in North Africa), in time of drought the maidens of Mazouna carry every evening in pro-cession through the streets a doll called ghonja, really a dressed-up wooden spoon, symbolizing a pre-Islamic rain-spirit. Often one of the girls carries on her shoulders a sheep, and her companions sing the following words: " Rain, fall, and I will give you my kid. He has a black head; he neither bleats Nor complains; he says not, ` I am cold.' Rain, who fillest the skins, Wet our raiment. Rain, who feedest the rivers, Overturn the doors of our houses." Here we have a sympathetic rain charm, combined with a prayer to the rain viewed as a personal goddess and with a promise or vow to give her the animal. The point of the promise lies of course in the fact that water is in that country stored and carried in sheep-skins.' Secondly, the vow is quite apart from established cults, and is not provided for in the religious calendar. The Roman vow (votum), as W. W. Fowler observes in his work The Roman Festivals (London, 1899), p. 346, " was the exception, not the rule; it was a promise made by an individual at some critical moment, not the ordered and recurring ritual of the family or the State." The vow, however, contained so large an element of ordinary prayer that in the Greek language one and the same word (ebxil) expressed both. The characteristic mark of the vow, as Suidas in his lexicon and the Greek Church fathers remark, was that it was a promise either of things to be offered to God in the future and at once consecrated to Him in view of their being so offered, or of austerities to be undergone. For offering and austerity, sacrifice and suffering, are equally calculated to appease an offended deity's wrath or win his goodwill. The Bible affords many examples of vows. Thus in judges xi. Jephthah " vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou wilt indeed deliver the children of Ammon into my hand, then it shall be that whosoever cometh forth out of the doors of my house
It is often difficult to distinguish a vow from an oath. Thas in Acts xxiii. 21, over forty Jews, enemies of Paul, bound themselves, under a curse, neither to eat nor to drink till they had slain him. In the Christian Fathers we hear of vows to abstain from flesh diet and wine. But of the abstentions observed by votaries, those which had relation to the barber's art were the commonest. Wherever individuals were concerned to create or confirm a tie connecting them with a god, a shrine or a particular religious circle, a hair-offering was in some form or other imperative. They began by polling their locks at the shrine and left them as a soul-token in charge of the god, and never polled them afresh until the vow was fulfilled. So Achilles consecrated his hair to the river Spercheus and vowed not to cut it till he should return safe from Troy; and the Hebrew Nazarite, whose strength resided in his flowing locks, only cut them off and burned them on the altar when the days of his vow were ended, and he could return to ordinary life, having achieved his mission. So in Acts xviii. 18 Paul " had shorn his head in Cenchreae, for he had a vow." In Acts xxi. 23 we hear of four Jews who, having a vow on them, had their heads shaved at Paul's expense. Among the ancient Chatti, as Tacitus relates (Germania, 31), young men allowed their hair and beards to grow, and vowed to court danger in that guise ' Professor A. Bel in paper Quelq se rites pour obtenir la pluic, in xiv" Congres des 0rientalistes (Alger, 19os).until they each had slain an enemy. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, ed. 1901, p. 483) with much probability explains such usages from the widespread primitive belief that a man's life lurks in his hair, so that the devotee being consecrated or taboo to a god, his hair must be retained during the period of taboo or purification (as it is called in Acts xxi. 26) lest it be dissipated and profaned. The hair being part and parcel of the votary, its profanation would profane him and break the taboo. The same author remarks that this is why, when the hair of a Maori chief
risk
" To thee, 0 Lord, as a rational whole burnt-offering, as mystic frankincense, as voluntary homage and worship , we offer up this thy servant N. or M."From the same point of view is to be explained the prohibition to one under a vow of flesh diet and fermented drinks; for it was believed that by partaking of these a man might introduce into his body
The same considerations help to explain the custom of votive offerings. Any popular shrine in Latin countries is hung with wax models of limbs that have been healed, of ships saved from wreck, or with pictures representing the votary's escape from perils by land and sea. So Cicero (de Deorum Natura, iii. 37) relates how a friend remarked to Diagoras the Atheist when they reached Samothrace: " You who say that the gods neglect men's affairs, do you not perceive from the many pictures how many have escaped the force of the tempest and reached harbour safel_y." Diagoras's answer, that the many more who had suffered shipwreck and perished had no pictures to record their fate does not concern us here. It is only pertinent to remark that these votivae tabellae and offerings may have had originally another significance than that of merely recording the. votary's salvation and of marking his gratitude. The model ship may be a substitute for the entire ship which is become sacred to the god, but cannot be deposited in the shrine; the miniature limbs of wax are substitutes for the real limbs which now belong to the god. In other cases the very objects which are taboo are given to the god as when a sailor deposits his salt-stained suit before the idol. The general idea, then, involved in vows, whether ancient or modern, is that to express which the modern anthropologist borrows the Polynesian word taboo. The votary desirous to " antedate his future act of service and make its efficacy begin at once," 1 formally dedicates through spoken formula
1 Religion of the Semites, Lect.ix.to guard inviolate the sanctity or taboo, the atmosphere of holiness or ritual purity, which envelops the persons or objects vowed or reserved to the god, and thereby separated from ordinary secular use. The consideration of the moral effect of vows upon those who take them belongs rather to the history of Christian asceticism. It may, however, be remarked here that monkish vows, while they may lend to a man's life a certain fixity of aim and moral intensity, nevertheless tend to narrow his interests, and paralyse his wider activities and sympathies. In particular a monk binds himself to a. lifelong and often morbid struggle against the order of nature; and motives become for him not good or bad according to the place they occupy in the living context of social life, but according as they bear upon an abstract and useless ideal. (F. C. C.)End of Article: VOW (Lat. votum, vow, promise: cf. VOTE) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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