Bombay it is believed that the cause of not getting children is that the man or his wife must have killed a serpent in their former birth, whose spirit haunts them and makes the woman barren. To get rid of the spirit which causes sterility, the serpent's image is burnt and its funeral rites are performed.' The desire for male offspring is so intense that some of these shrines do a thriving trade in providing nostrums for this purpose. One extraordinary method of procuring children, which long troubled our magistrates in Upper India, was for the would-be mother to burn down the hut of some neighbour. The Panjâbi woman, who under the reign of British law is prevented from burning the house of her neighbour, now takes a little grass from seven thatches and burns it.' In another form of the charm the Khândh priest takes the woman to the confluence of two streams, sprinkles water over her to purify her from the dangerous influence of the spirit and makes an offering to the god of births. Some special influence has been in many lands considered to attach to a person who has been publicly executed, and to the appliances used by the hangman. Recently at an execution in Bombay, the hangman was observed to carefully secure the rope, and particularly that part of it which had encircled the neck of the culprit. He stated that he could sell every quarter inch of it, as it averted evil spirits and ghosts, and even prevented death from hanging. This idea accounts for the respect paid throughout Europe to the mandrake, which is supposed to be generated from the droppings of the brain of a thief on the gallows. In Cornwall a wen or strumous swelling can be cured by touching it with the hand of a man who has been publicly hanged. According to the same principle, barren women in India bathe underneath a person who has been hanged, and women of the middle classes try to obtain a piece of the wood of the gallows for the same object. 3 Another practice depends upon the principle that creeping under a bent tree or through a perforated stone expels the demon. Other instances of this will be given in another place. Hence in Gujarât, when an ascetic of the Dûndiya sect dies, women who seek the blessing of a son try to secure it by creeping under the litter on which his corpse is removed.1 A rite carried out with the same object rests on a sort of symbolic magic indicating fertility. Along the roads may often be seen trees almost destroyed by a noxious creeper known as the Akâsh Bel. Women in hope of offspring often transplant this from one tree to another, and are thus a decided nuisance to a district officer with a taste for arboriculture. But the most approved plan is to visit a shrine with a reputation for healing this class of malady. There the patient is given a cocoanut, which is a magic substance, a fruit, or even a barley-corn from the holy of holies. Mr. Hartland has recently made an elaborate study of this subject, and he points out the principle on which the eating of such substances produced the desired effect. "Whether from an analogy between the normal act of impregnation and that of eating and drinking, or because savages had learnt that at least one mode of operating effectively on the organism, for purposes alike of injury and healing, was by drugs taken through the mouth, this was the favourite method of supernatural impregnation." And again-" Flowers, fruit and other vegetables, eggs, fishes, spiders, worms, and even stones, are all capable of becoming human beings. They only await absorption in the shape of food, or in some other appropriate manner, into the body of a woman, to enable the metamorphosis to be accomplished.' 99 2 The same idea constantly occurs in Indian folk-lore. The barren queen is given the juice of a pomegranate by a Faqîr, or the king plucks one of the seven mangoes which grow on 1 Forbes, "Râs Mâla," ii. 332, quoted by Campbell," Notes,” 15. 2 46 Legend of Perseus," i. 72, 207. a special tree, or a beggar gives the princess the drug which causes her to give birth to twins. Even in the Râmâyana we read that Râja Dasaratha divides the oblation among his wives and they conceive. Even nowadays in Florence, if a woman wishes to be with child, she goes to a priest and gets from him an enchanted apple, with which she repairs to Saint Anna, who was the Lucina of Roman times, and repeats a prayer or a spell.' Some holy men, it must be admitted, do not escape the tongue of slander for their doings in this department of their business. HARMLESS SAINTS AND GODLINGS. Most of these saints and godlings whom we have been considering, are comparatively harmless, and even benevolent. Such is nearly always the case with the ghosts of the European dead, who are constantly deified. Perhaps because the Sahib is such a curiously incomprehensible personage to the rustic, he is believed to retain his powers in the other world. But it is a remarkable and unconscious tribute to the foreign ruler that his ghost should be beneficent. The gardener in charge of the station cemetery in Mirzapur some time ago informed me that he constantly sees the ghosts of the ladies and gentlemen buried there coming out for a walk in the hot summer nights, and that they never harm him. But with ordinary graves it is necessary to be cautious. As appears in the cycle of tales which turn on the magic ointment which enables the possessor to see the beings of the other world, spirits hate being watched. The spirit, for instance, often announces its wishes. When the Emperor Tughlaq began to build the tomb of the Saint Bahâwal Haq, a voice was heard from below, saying, "You are treading on my body." Another site was chosen at a short 1 Lâl Bihâri Dê, “Folk-tales of Bengal," I, 117, 187; Tawney, "Katha Sarit Sâgara," i. 52, 172, 355, 382; ii. 216; Knowles, "Folk-tales of Kashmir," 131, 416. 2 Leland, "Etruscan Roman Remains," 246. distance, and the voice said, "You are treading on my knees." He went a little further, and the voice said, " You are treading on my toes." So he had to go to the other end of the fort, and as the voice was not heard there, the tomb was built. If you visit an old tomb, it is well to clap your hands, as the ghost sometimes revisits its restingplace, and if discovered in déshabille, is likely to resent the intrusion in a very disagreeable manner. So it is very dangerous to pollute a tomb or insult its occupant in any way, and instances have occurred of cases of epilepsy and hysteria, which were attributed to the neglect of these precautions. Thus, there is nothing permanent, no established rule of faith in the popular belief of the rustic. Discredited saints and shrines are always passing into contempt and oblivion; new worthies are being constantly canonized. The worst part of the matter is that there is no official controller of the right to deification, no Advocatus Diaboli to dispute the claims of the candidate to celestial honours. At the same time the system, though often discredited by fraud, admirably illustrates the elastic character of the popular creed. Hinduism would hardly be so congenial to the minds of the masses, if some rigid supervising agency disputed the right of any tribe to worship its hero, of any village to canonize its local worthy. The steady popularity of the system, for the present at least, shows that it satisfactorily provides for the religious wants of the people. CHAPTER V. WORSHIP OF THE MALEVOLENT DEAD. Πρώτη δὲ ψυχὴ Ἐλπήνορος ἦλθεν ἐταίρου, Odyssey, xi. 51, 52. THESE deified ghosts and saints whom we have been discussing, though occasionally touchy and sensitive to insult or disrespect, are, as a rule, benevolent. But there is another class of beings at whose feet the rustic lies in grievous and perpetual bondage. These are the malevolent dead. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD HOSTILE. It is not difficult to understand why the spirits of the dead should be regarded as hostile. A stranger is, in the belief of all primitive people, synonymous with an enemy; and the spirit of the departed having abandoned his own and joined some other and invisible tribe, whose domains lie outside the world of sense, is sure to be considered inimical to the survivors left on earth. As we have already seen, even the usually kindly spirit of the departed household dead requires propitiation and resents neglect; much more those of a different tribe or family. Again, those disembodied souls in particular whose departure from the earth occurred under unexpected or specially tragical circumstances are naturally considered to have been ejected against their will from their tenement of clay, and as for many of them the proper funeral rites have not been performed, they carry with them to the next world an angry longing for revenge. As Brand, writing of British |