Indian Antiquary Vol 26

SR No.: 032518
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 360
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 15 MB

Page 309

NOVEMBER, 1897.]
SPIRIT BASIS OF BELIEF AND CUSTOM.
303
In a Hindu temple some of the spirits, or some of the spirit of the object worshipped, passes into every portion of the sweetmeats which are handed to the worshippers. So an epidemic is a spirit which can divide itself endlessly and pass into the bodies of the whole population of a city or country. Compare, among the Jews, in the Old Testament (Numbers, xiv. 25): - “The Lord took the spirit that was on Moses and put it upon the seventy elders and they prophesied." And in the New Testament (St. Luke, viii. 27; St. Marl, v. 9): two thousand devils pass out of a man who is described as having only one devil. The experience of the spirit that suddenly sways a gathering of men, of cattle, or of other animals, makes easy the belief in the divisibility of spirit. A large gathering may be possessed by the guardian spirit, and yet the spirit in the guardian be undiminished. Part of a witch's familiar or house-spirit may go and worry some one and still not forsake its black cat or other everyday home. A similar experience explains such phrases16 as "the Spirit or Genius of the Age," which seems a trace of the belief that like every planet each age is under the influence of some special spirit. Another case of spirit divided and yet unlessened is Glamour. “Glamour," says Napier, 18 " is a witch-power which makes the people see whatever the witch wishes them to see." The spirit of the witch passes into each of the crowd, and looking through their eyes makes them see as the witch wishes, the witch's spirit being all the time nnlessened in the -witch's body.
Again, among the Hindus, swarms of spirits constantly pass into the great Gods or Guardians. The Almighty is the home of spirits; Ganpati, the leader of the hosts, has a host in himself; Mahadev has his 1,000 names. His worshippers welcome Khandoba with the sbont "yelkot, seven crores." The experience in the death of a man - the fading of the warmth, the ceasing of the pulse, the failure of breath, the disappearance of the image from the eyeball, seem to imply the departure of a set of distinct sprits.19
Two other classes - strangers and enemies - have added to the hosts of evil spirits. In inost countries and at most times, as in Germany, where fiend means foe, enemies have been considered either devils or devil-possessed. The Chinese call all strangers devils; the Tartar retorts by speaking of the Chinaman as a dev or magician.20 Mr. Conway21 finds in the demons, in which men have believed, a catalogue of the obstacles in the fight of life. He holds that the number of survivals or custom traces of a demon pretty faithfully shew the degree to which the special evil the devil represents affected the early man. Conway arranges his demons or early unfriendly forces under twelve heads :- hunger, heat, cold, physical convulsions, destructive animals, human enemies, barrenness, obstacles, river or hill, illusion, darkness, disease, death. This grouping of early spirits seems artificial. The early inan dreads not the head of a class of spirits: he dreads the attacks of individual spirits, generally ancestral. The un-moral demon who rules a class of facts corresponds to the un-moral guardians, the gods of the Vedas or of Greece and Rome. So the immoral devil belongs to the same later stage as the moral God or guardian of the Jew and Christian. With the teaching of universal experience the whole world became spirit-ruled and spirit-explained. Again, as knowledge and power grow spirits retire. In one branch after another spirit is replaced by law. Spirit fades from plant and animal : it stays in man because man's consciousness seems to imply at least a two-fold nature - body and mind. Even in the thought of man the domain of spirit keeps shrinking. Disease, even madness, is physical, dreams are children of the body, passions are not prompted from without, sin is not spirit-possession, desire is not a fiend's hint, humour is not a demon's chuckle, neither freshness nor skill is genius-caused. In spite of this steady drawing in of the borders of 16 Browa's Christian Morals, Vol. I. p. 26.
11 Henry Vaughan (1660), Poems, Ed. 1889, p. 7. 18 Napier's Folk-Lore, p. 192.
19 Hindu doctors (Wise's Hindu Medicine, p. 2(8) consider the pulue a spirit, because it is a test of life. Fuller roference to this subject comes more suitably under " Funeral Rites."
* Shea's Early Kings of Persin, P. 53, note 1. The idea that the stranger is a spirit appears in the wide-spread belief that, at the skirts of traffio, fartravelled traders deal with spirita. Compare Do Chuignes Huns, Vol. I. p. 139.
21 Moncure Conway's Demonology and Devil-Lore, Vol. I. p. 35.