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168
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
every heart to pant in pain for him, and not for itself. The worst sight of all is when the frenzied stalwart men fall senseless to the ground in deathly faint. The contrast between the ecstatic frenzy and the senseless mass that a moment before was maddened in the strife and now lies apparently dead is very awful. For a moment the beating ceases the hoarse shout of "Husain," "Hassan," lulls. Two or three men dart in to carry off the collapsed mourner. They throw water over him, lay him in the breeze and wait till he comes to. Then swells again the bitter cry, the deadened thuds. It was bad enough to see such things in the crowded
[JUNE 7, 1872.
street; it is more horrible now in the retired house. Husain has had a long mourning.
When all are too faint, when the body will no longer aid the spirit, this dance of the possessed comes to an end. Water and sherbet are liberally distributed. The house-owner brings out his húqah and composes his feelings with a smoke. The assembly breaks up, and we go home wondering why Christians, who have a still more saddening story, as the key of their hopes, should fail so grievously in realising its intense interest, should seem to a heathen and Muhammadan world as if the mystery of their faith were but a series of empty words.
FOLKLORE OF ORISSA.
BY JOHN BEAMES, B.C.S., M.R.A.S., &c., BALASOR.
OWING to the isolation in which their country has remained for so mary ages, the peasantry of Orissa have retained old world ideas and fancies to a greater extent than any other Aryan people of India. They are shy of imparting these ideas to strangers, and a man might live among them for years without finding out the singular views and original processes of reasoning on which many of their habits are based. This shyness arises, I suppose, from the gradual infiltration of modern ideas. The men are beginning to be ashamed of these antiquated fancies, and though in their hearts believing in them, would rather not talk about them, and would prefer to pass for men of the world, blasé indifferent free-thinkers to whom all ideas of religion are childish inventions fit only to be smiled at. The women however are still bigotedly attached to the traditions of the past, and the ruder peasantry are in the same primitive stage of credulity.
I do not propose to classify these strange superstitions, but merely to string them together as I hear them, noting here and there curious parallelisms between them and those of our own English peasantry. Students of comparative mythology may draw their own conclusions, but as I do not feel convinced that every one we read of in ancient history represents the sun, nor that all heathen religions are" myths of the dawn," I do not wish to complicate my simple remarks by plunging into the misty regions of the early Aryans, or those of Baal, Bel, Belus and so forth. Human nonsense, like human sense, is very much the same
everywhere, and it is only because in ruling men one must take their nonsense into consideration quite as earnestly as their sense, that these scraps of folk-lore are worth recording at all.
Witches abound in Orissa and are called dâñanî, (Sanskr. डाकिणी or डॉअणी) a word in use in all the Aryan languages of India. They have the power of leaving their bodies and going about invisibly, but if you can get a flower of the pan, or betelleaf, and put it in your right ear, you will be able to see the witches, and talk to them with impunity. The pân however never flowers, or rather the witches always cause the flower to be invisible, so you are not likely to find it. This is like the English peasants' belief in the virtues of fern-seed.
Witches congregate under banian or pipal trees (in Oriya the first is bor, 43, Skr. z,--the second ōshŏth 97, Skr. 3) which grow on the margin of a tank, and if you sit under such a tree in such a position at either of the dawns, that is in the grey of morning or at evening twilight, you will come to grief, especially if the day be Saturday, when the influence of the planet Saturn prevails, or Tuesday when that of Mars is strong. On those days the witches are most powerful, and you will be struck with sickness, or idiotcy, or suffer loss of property.
A favourite pastime of witches is to get inside the body of a person, who then becomes insensible. In this case you must repeat the following very powerful mantro or spell, and then ask the witch her name, which she will be obliged to tell you. You may then go to her
