A man walks along a river bank and a crocodile seizes not his body but his shadow, and draws him in; to lose that shadow is to die. This is the soul conceived as shadow, and the shelf here is unusually full. The comparative record gathered by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), the English anthropologist, in Primitive Culture (first published 1871), lays out the languages that make the identification plain: the Algonquins call a man's soul "his shadow", the Abipones let one word "loákal" serve for "shadow, soul, echo, image", and among the Basutos, who call the surviving spirit the "shadow", it is exactly this that "a crocodile may seize" "in the" water. In Old Calabar the spirit is the "ukpon" or "shadow," "for a man to lose which is fatal". Tylor reaches even into Dante, noting that the dead in Purgatory knew the poet lived because "his figure cast a shadow on the ground".

If the shadow is the soul, then whatever is done to the shadow is done to the man. James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish anthropologist whose Golden Bough (this abridgement published 1922) is named among Thompson's authorities, gathers the dangers this belief opens. On the island of Wetar there "are magicians who can make a man ill by stabbing his shadow with a" pike; and when the sage Sankara soared into the air over Nepaul, the Grand Lama, "perceiving his shadow swaying and wavering on the ground", "struck his knife into it and down fell Sankara and broke his" neck. The precaution follows the peril: at a Chinese funeral the bystanders retreat from the coffin, for a man's health is endangered by "allowing his shadow to be enclosed in a coffin", and the grave-diggers tie cloth tightly round their waists to bind their shadows fast.

Between the two witnesses the same equation holds from opposite sides — Tylor's philology showing the soul named as shadow, Frazer's cases showing the shadow suffering the soul's wounds. If your shadow can be stabbed, hidden, or shut in a box to your harm, where exactly do you end?