William Crooke

“ I have more than once seen a criminal ascend the scaffold with the utmost composure when he was allowed to grasp a cow’s tail before the hangman did his office. The tail of the cow is also used in the marriage ritual, and the tail of the wild cow, though nowadays only used by grooms, was once the symbol of power, and waved over the ruler to protect him from evil spirits. ”

“ The tortures which the soul undergoes in its journey to the land of the dead are vividly pictured in some of the sacred writings.151 He is scorched by heat and pierced by wind and cold, attacked by beasts of prey, stumbling through thorns and filth, until he at last reaches the dread river Vaitaranî, which rolls its flood of abominations between him and the other shore. So, when a Hindu dies, a lamp made of flour is placed in his hands to light his ghost to the realm of Yama. ”

“ To him, again, the belief is familiar that the spirits of his ancestors appear in the form of animals, as among the Drâvidian races they come in the shape of a tiger which attacks the surviving relatives, or as a chicken which leaves the mark of its footsteps in the ashes when it re-visits its former home.
So, all these people believe that the witch soul wanders about at night, and for want of a better shape enters into some animal, takes the form of a tiger or a bear, or flies through the air like a bird. ”

“ Like the Jigar Khor she obtains her powers by eating human flesh, or like modern witches, who claim to possess the Dâyan kâ Mantra or Dâkinî’s spell, by which she can tear out the heart of her victim.
The powers of such witches are innumerable. They can find anything on earth, can open or patch up the sky, possess second sight, can restore the dead to life, can set fire to water, can turn stones into wax, can separate lovers, can metamorphose the hero into any shape they please. They control the weather and cause storms and tempests. ”

“ Many, as they revolve round it, twist a string of soft cotton round the trunk. The vessel of water for the comfort of the departing soul on its way to the land of the dead is hung from its branches, and beneath it are placed the rough stones which form the shrine of the village godling. ”

“ The latter defend themselves as best they can with round leather shields and stag horns, as they dodge in and out among the crowd, and now and again have their flight cut off, and are driven back upon the crowd of excited viragoes. Many laughable incidents occur. Not unfrequently blood is drawn; but an accident of this kind is regarded rather as an omen of good fortune, and has never been known to give rise to any ill-feeling. Whenever the fury of their female assailants appears to be subsiding, it is again excited by the men shouting at them snatches of ribald rhymes. ”

“ At this period an evil spirit is supposed to infest the locality, and to get rid of it, men, women, and children go in procession round and through every part of the village with sticks in their hands, as if beating for game, singing a wild chant and vociferating loudly, till they feel assured that the bad spirit must have fled, and they make noise enough to frighten a legion. ”

“ It is quite possible that the worship of stocks and stones may not in all places be based on exactly the same train of ideas. To the ruder races, the more curious or eccentric the form of the stone is, the more likely it is to be the work and possibly the abode of a spirit, and in a stoneless land, like the Gangetic plain, any stone is a wonder, and likely to be revered. ”

“ So great is the power of the Nîm over spirits and spirit disease, that in Bombay, when a woman is delivered of a child, Nîm leaves and cow’s urine are, as a rule, kept at the entrance of the lying-in room, in order that the child and its mother may not be affected by an evil spirit, and on their New Year’s Day it is considered essential for every Hindu to worship the Nîm tree and to eat its leaves mixed with pepper and sugar, that he may not suffer from any sickness or disease during the year. In practice very few worship the tree, but its leaves are generally eaten by most of them. ”

“ This feeling comes out strongly in popular folk-lore, much of which is made up of instances of metamorphosis such as these. The witch or sorcerer is always changing into a tiger, a monkey, or a fish; the princess is always appearing out of the aubergine or pomegranate.
We have, again, the familiar theory to which reference has already been made, that the demon or magician has an external soul, which he keeps occasionally in the Life Index, which is often a bird, a tree, and an animal. If this life index can be seized and destroyed, the life of the monster is lost with it. ”

“ In the evening the young fellows of the village assemble, and with loud shouts and clashing of tins, ringing of cow-bells and goat-bells, and cracking of whips, tramp over hill and dale to another village, where the young men receive them with like uproar. ”

“ The day’s work often ends with a tremendous romp, in which every one throws mud at his neighbours, or tries to give him or her a roll in it. No such ceremony is observed in sowing other crops, rice having been formerly, in all probability, the most important crop. It is also the custom to make a rude image of a man in dough and to throw it away as a sacrifice to the Ishta Deotâ or household deity.”10 This can hardly be anything but a survival of an actual sacrifice to appease the field godlings at sowing time. ”

“ We have already met with Bâgheswar, the tiger deity of the Mirzapur forest tribes. The Santâls also worship him, and the Kisâns honour him as Banrâja, or “lord of the jungle.” They will not kill him, and believe that in return for their devotion he will spare them. Another branch of the tribe does not worship him, but all swear by him. The Bhuiyârs, on the contrary, have no veneration for him, and think it their interest to slay him whenever they have an opportunity. The Juângs take their oaths on earth from an ant-hill, and on a tiger’s skin ”

“ Many witches obtain power over the fever demon. She fastens a string round the hero’s neck, and by a spell turns him into an ape. She often kills a child, and the heroine, like Genoveva, is falsely accused, and expelled from her home, until the plot is discovered and she is restored to her husband’s love. Lastly, we have the conflict between the powers of good and evil, the benevolent and malignant witch, which forms one of the stock incidents of the European folk-tales.10 The malignant, liver-eating witch is naturally associated with the tomb-haunting badger. ”

“ When a disputed boundary is under settlement, a cow skin is placed over the head and shoulders of the arbitrator, who is thus imbued with the divine influence, and gives a just decision. It is curious that until quite recently there was a custom in the Hebrides of sewing up a man in the hide of a bull, and leaving him for the night on a hill-top, that he might become a spirit medium.88 The pious Hindu touches the cow’s tail at the moment of dissolution, and by her aid he is carried across the dread river of death. ”

“ Cure of Snake-bite.
In Hoshangâbâd there were once two brothers, Râjawa and Soral; the ghost of the former cures snake-bite, and that of the latter cattle murrain. The moment a man is bitten, he must tie a string or a strip of his dress and fasten it round his neck, crying, “Mercy! O God Râjawa!” To call on Ghori Bâdshâh, the Delhi Emperor, who conquered the country, or Râmjî Dâs Bâba will do as well. At the same time he makes a vow to give so much to the god if he recovers. When he gets home they use various tests to ascertain if the poison is in him still. ”

“ In Ireland, “if a candle is placed in a dead hand, neither wind nor water can extinguish it, and if carried into a house, the inmates will sleep the sleep of the dead as long as it remains under the roof, and no power on earth can wake them as long as the dead hand holds the candle.” The hand of a dead man is also used to stir the milk when butter will not form.124 So, in Northern India, thieves have a superstition that the ashes of a corpse will, if sprinkled by the door of a house, prevent the inmates from awaking during the commission of a burglary. ”

“ A woman carrying her child on her return from a strange village, lest she should bring the influence of some foreign evil spirit back with her, will, before entering her own homestead, pass seven little stones seven times round the head of the baby, and throw them in different directions, so as to pass away any evil that may have been contracted. When a sorcerer is called in to attend a case attributed to demoniacal possession, he whisks the patient with a branch of the Nîm, Madâr, or Camel thorn, all of which are more or less sacred trees and have acquired a reputation as preservatives. ”

“ The elephant constantly occurs in folk-lore. In the projection of its forehead it possesses a pearl, known as the Kunjara Mani, or Gaja Mukta, which is invested with magical qualities. In the folk-tales the wooden horse of Troy is represented by an artificial elephant filled with soldiers; other elephants have the power of flying through the air; in other stories, as in one of La Fontaine’s fables, an elephant selects a king by raising him up with his trunk; the elephant Kuvalyapîda is the guardian of a kingdom, and touching an elephant is one of the tests of a woman’s chastity. ”

“ The conception of the worshipper will always vary in regard to it. To the savage it will be the actual home or the occasional resting-place of the spirit; to the idolater of more advanced ideas it will be little more than a symbol, which reminds him of the deity without shape or form whom he is bound to worship.
Other fetish stones, again, by their form prove that they are the work of another or a higher race. Thus, on the village fetish mounds we often find the carved relics of some Buddhistic shrine, or the prehistoric stone implements, which were the work of a forgotten people. ”

“ All through folk-lore we find the idea that man has kinship [202] with animals generally accepted. We constantly find the girl wooed by the frog, marrying the pigeon, elephant, eagle, or whale. Every child in the nursery reads of the frog Prince, and no savage sees any particular incongruity in his marriage and transformation. In more than one of the Indian tales the childless wife longs for a child and is delivered of a snake.
The incident of animal metamorphosis is also familiar. Thus, in one of Somadeva’s tales his mistress turns a man into an ox ”

“ In Bombay, some old Hindu woman, to cure a child affected by the Evil Eye, waves salt and water round its face and strikes the ground with a broom three times; and among the Bani Isrâîls of Bombay, when the midwife drives off the blast of the Evil Eye, she holds in her left hand a shoe, a winnowing fan, and a broom.129 In Italy, the broom is an old Latin charm against sorcery. The Beriyas, a gypsy tribe of the Ganges-Jumna Duâb, drive off the disease demon with a broom. In Oudh, it is said, when a broomstick has been done with, it should always be laid down, and not left standing. ”

“ We know that in many places the stone axe and arrow head of the Age of Stone are invested with magic qualities, and Mr. Macritchie has gone so far as to assume that the various so-called fairy houses and fairy hills which abound in Europe are really the abodes of a primitive pigmy race, which survive to our days as the fairies. The belief in the fairies would thus go back to a time anterior to the use of metals, and these supernatural beings would naturally feel an abhorrence for iron, a new discovery and one of the greatest ever made by man. ”

“ There is first the tree which is regarded as embodying or representing the spirit which influences the fertility of crops and human beings. Hence the respect paid to memorial trees, where the people assemble, as at the village Pîpal, which is valued for its shade and beauty and its long connection with the social life of the community. This would naturally be regarded as the abode of some god and forms the village shrine, a convenient centre for the religious worship of the local deities, where they reside and accept the worship and offerings of their votaries. ”

“ In the same way the Irish witches flit on November Eve, and “on that night mortal people should keep at home, or they will suffer for it; for souls of the dead have power over all things on that night of the year, and they hold a festival with the fairies, and drink red wine from the fairy cups and dance to fairy music till the moon goes down.”15 Of the Allhallows demon Professor Rhys writes: “This night was the Saturnalia of all that was hideous and uncanny in the world of spirits. ”

“ The Kharwârs of Mirzapur have a wild legend, which tells how long ago an unmarried girl of the tribe died, and was being cremated. While the relations were collecting wood for the pyre, a ghost entered the corpse, but the friends managed to expel him. Since then great care is taken not to leave the bodies of women unwatched. So, in the Panjâb, when a great person is cremated the bones and ashes are carefully watched till the fourth day, to prevent a magician interfering with them. If he has a chance, he can restore the deceased to life, and ever after retain him under his influence. ”

“ The throwing of old shoes at an English wedding seems on the same principle to be based on the idea of scaring the demon of barrenness. According to Mr. Hartland,81 the gipsies of Transylvania throw old shoes and boots on a newly married pair when they enter their tent, expressly to enhance the fertility of the union.
In the same way in India, people who are too poor to afford another protective place on the top of their houses a shoe heel upwards. This seems to give some additional efficacy to the charm, because we find the same rule in force elsewhere. ”

“ In India, the popular idea about Momiâî is that a boy, the fatter and blacker the better, is caught, a small hole is bored in the top of his head, and he is hung up by the heels over a slow fire. The juice or essence of his body is in this way distilled into seven drops of the potent medicine known as Momiâî. ”

“ They say that the spirit of the dead man will want it to hack his way through the jungles of the lower world. When the Bhuiyârs cremate a corpse they throw near the spot an axe, if the deceased was a man, and a Khurpi or weeding spud, if a woman. No one would dare to appropriate such things, as he would be forced to join the ghastly company of their owners. Where the corpse is burned they leave a platter made of leaves containing a little boiled rice, and they sprinkle on the ground all the ordinary kinds of grain and some turmeric and salt as food for the dead in the next world. ”