VOUSSOIR, in architecture and building, one of the wedge shaped stones, tiles, bricks or blocks of other material of which an arch (q.v.) is composed. The lowest voussoir on each side of an arch is known as a springer (q.v.) ; the highest, or central voussoir, as a keystone (q.v.).
VOW, 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 favour to his votary in return for the promise made or service declared. Different formalities and ceremonies may in different religions attend the taking of a vow, but in all the wrath of heaven or of hell is visited upon one who breaks it. A vow has to be distinguished, first, from other and lower ways of persuading or constraining supernatural pow ers 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.
The term vow does not apply to the uses of imitative magic in which the supernatural power is, so to speak, mechanically con strained to act by the spell or magical rite. The deities to whom vows are made or discharged are already personal beings, capable of entering into contracts or covenants with man, of understand ing 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 outweigh the 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. Thus sympathetic rain charms are often combined with a prayer to the rain viewed as a personal deity. Secondly, the vow is quite apart from established cults, and is not provided for in the religious calendar. The Roman vow "was the exception,
not the rule; it was a promise made by an individual at some crit ical moment" (W. W. Fowler, The Roman Festivals [London, P. The vow, however, contained so large an element of ordinary prayer that in the Greek language one and the same word expressed both. The characteristic of the vow was that it was a promise either of things to be offered to a 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 aus terity, sacrifice and suffering, are equally calculated to appease an offended deity's wrath or win his goodwill. The Bible affords many examples of vows. A thing or person vowed to the deity became holy or tabu, and for it nothing could be substituted. The prohibition, to one under a vow, of flesh diet and fermented drinks is due to the belief that by partaking of these a man might introduce into his body the unclean spirits which inhabited them. The brute soul which infested meat (especially when the animal was strangled), and the cardiac demon, as the rabbis called it, which was harboured in wine, were abhorred. Similar con siderations 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, which may have had originally another significance than that of merely recording the votary's salvation and of marking his grati tude. 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.