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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(SEPTEMBER, 1895.
old Tatar love songs. Mr. Elworthy is, no doubt, correct in explaining that the object of the lewd fescennine or marringe songs was to avert evil influences.70 The Egyptian women (B. C. 480), floating in boats down the Nile to the fair of the goddess at Bubastis, in passing a town, drew near, sang, beat cymbals, cried out, lifted up their clothes, and loaded the townspeople with abuse.71 The women of Ceylon keep at a distance Bodrima the ghost who died in child-bed, by waving brooms and abusing the demon with a string of epithets.72 In Rome, on the 15th March, at the festival of Anna Peretina, the country people had rustic sports, drinking, singing and dancing. A remarkable and unaccountable feature, says Wilson, was the use of ancient or vulgar jokes and obscene language.73 At the Athenian tenia the women made jests and Jampoons against each other.74 The Fiji women welcome warriors back with obscene songs.75 In the Roman triumph, the soldiers shouted Io Triumphe, and sang songs with the coarsest ribaldry at the general's cxpense.78 The great spirit-scaring festival at Axim, on the Gold Coast, begins with seven days of the freest lampooning and abuse.77 At the great harvest festival of the Hos in North-East India, sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children.78
The Cruise of the Marchesato gives insight into the reason why indecent statues or pictures, especially figures in the act of sexual union, and the emblems of the union of the sexes, came to have a religious meaning and to be objects of worship. The ruined Papuan temple at Monokware, in Dorei Bay, in north-east New Guinea, had on either side, not far from the entrance, a great image of a man and woman in sexual union. Within were other carved wooden figures of much the same kind, grotesque and indecent, intended to represent the Aucestors of the Nafoor tribe, and known as the Mon or First People. In a note to page 281, Dr. Guillemard states that both in New Ireland and in the north-west and north-east of New Guinea, the aim in making the Divine Nine-pins, called Kurovar, which are the chief local household gods, is to house the spirit of a dead ancestor. He says: - "The belief is that the ghost must have some habitation on earth, or it will haunt the survivors of its late family." Whatever lodges the uneasy ghost protects the family from suffering and is therefore lucky. The object of the indecent figures is the same as the object of the Divine Nine-pins, that is, to tempt ancestors into them. Indecent is & vague word. It may mean simply naked. The belief, that the private parts are specially spirit-homes, seems based on the fact that they are appetite and passion centres, affected without or against the will of those to whom they belong. The belief on this point is a case of the great early religious law, the unwilled is the spirit-caused. To the early man both the local physical and the general mental effects of the promptings of the sex appetite imply the entrance and working of some outside spirit. In later religious thought the effects are explained as due to possession by Venuses, Loves, or Nymphs. In another view, the cause is Satan warring in man's members, or the old Adam goading to sin. Since, therefore, the private parts are great spirit haunts, they can be used as spirit-housers. Therefore, the private parts are lucky. The belief, tbat the private parts are specially open to spirit attacks, seems to be the origin of physical decency. The private parts are kept hid, lest the evil eye or other evil spirit should through thein enter the body. So to intercept any fiend-bearing glance, the naked Madras Hindu child has hung round its waist a heart or V-like vulva or yoni-shaped metal plate. Similarly, the sense of ceremonial or religious nakedness in the attendant of the king, or in the devotee, or vow-payer of the god is that their nakedness draws into themselves the evil spirits, which, unhoused, might have vexed the king or the god.
** Elworthy's The Evil Eye, p. 125. Compare Munro's Catullus, 16, quoted in Smith's Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vol. I. p. 839.
11 Herodoties, Vol. II. p. 60 ; Wilkinson's Eryptians, 2nd Series, Vol. I. p. 279. Vol. II. p. 280. t's Demonology and Fitchcraft in Ceylon, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Ceylon (1887), p. 87. 13 Wilson's Works, Vol. III. p. 239.
* Potter's Antiquities, Vol. I. p. 487. * Featherman's Social History. Vol. II. p. 217. 6 Smith's Roman and Greek Antiquities, Vol. II. p. 897 11 The Golden Bough, Vol. II. p. 170.
75 Dalton's Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, p. 196. T! Vol. II. pp. 280-382.
