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A vow (Lat. votum, vow, promise; see vote) is a transaction between a person 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 vow is a kind of oath, with the god being both the witness and recipient of the promise.
The god on his part is usually reckoned to be going to grant or to have granted already some special favor to his votary in
return for the promise made or service declared.
A vow has to be distinguished, firstly, from other and lower ways of persuading or constraining supernatural powers to give
what man desires and to help him in time of need; and secondly, from the ordered ritual and regularly recurring ceremonies of religion. These two
distinctions must be examined a little more at length.
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 idea -- even if it
exists -- of 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 Maghreb (in North Africa), in time of drought the maidens of Ma.zouna carry every evening in procession 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 filiest 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.1
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 (ebxi~) 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 11. 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' to meet me, when I return in peace from the children. of Ammon, it shall be the Lord's, and I
will offer it up for a burnt-offering.' In the sequel it is his own daughter who so meets him, and he sacrifices her after a
respite of two months granted her in order to 'bewail her virginity upon the mountains.' A thing or person thus vowed to the
deity became holy or taboo; and for it, as the above story indicates, nothing could be substituted. It belonged to once to the
sanctuary or to the priests who represented the god. In the Jewish religion, the
latter, under certain conditions, defined in Leviticus 27, could permit it to be
redeemed. But to substitute an unclean for a clean beast which had been vowed, or an imperfect victim for a flawless one, was to
court with certainty the divine displeasure.
It is often difficult to distinguish a vow from an oath. A vow is an oath, but an oath
is only a vow if the divine being is the recipient of the promise and is not merely a witness. Thus in Acts 23:21, 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 barbel'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 18:18 Paul had shorn his head in Cenchreae, for he had a vow. In Acts 21:23 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."
The first version of this article was copied from the 1911 Encyclopędia Britannica.
Reference
Professor A. Eel in paper Quelq ise rites pour obtenir la pluic, in xiv Congrčs des Orientalistes (Alger, 1905).
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