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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
reaches the bride's marriage porch, he is met by the bride's mother, who four times pulls his nose.39 These nose and ear wringings are performed neither to cause laughter, nor to beguile spirits to believe that the babe and the bridegroom are not held in honour. The great care taken, in the Musalman ceremonial bath at the close of a period of impurity, to prevent any spirit lurking in the car or up the nostril saggests that both in the case of the babe and of the bridegroom the object of the nose and ear pulling is to expell trespassers. Among English men, boys or intimates are saluted by a slap on the back. Aubrey (A. D. 1650) says: - "The common old English salutation was, 'How dost thou do,' with a thump on the shoulder."39 The king of Dahomey used to affect familiarity with the English and slap them on the back with his open hand. This apparently was a copied salute.40 To attach a spirit-meaning to the slap on the back as a salute or evil-scarer might seem more than farfetched, but for this passage in Plato's Timæus: 41 "The most painfol attacks of air are caused when the wind gets about the sinews, and especially when the pressure is in the great sinews of the shoulder. These are termed tetanus." Furious dancing is another salute to scare evil out of the stranger. In A. D. 575, Zemarchus, the emperor Jastin's ambassador to the Great Turk, Dizaba los, on reaching the encampment, was met by raging men who shewed him iron, carried fire round him, and danced furiously, as if driving away evil spirits. It was apparently to scare spirits out of the stranger, that, in 1836, the herald of the South African chief, Moselekatse, a naked man, foaming and glaring with excitement, appeared before Capt. Harris. When he entered, the herald roared like a lion, moved his arm like an elephant's trunk, tip-toed like an ostrich, and humbled himself in the dust like an infant and wept. The object of these, as of other animal dances, apparently, was to house the spirits which had come with the stranger. In Malacca and Singapor, the saluter lifts the left leg of the person saluted first over the saluter's right leg, and then over the saluter's face. This, at first, seems & case of submission. Consideration shews that the action is inconsistent with submission, as submission could hardly have devised a form of salute which gives the submitter so excellent a chance of laying his lord and master on the broad of his back. The lifting of the leg seems to stand for a lifting of the whole body with the object of helping the saluted to shake off evil inflacnces. Offerings are another salute whose object is to relieve the saluted from haunting influences. When & pregnant Pârsi girl goes to her parents' house, as she enters the house, an elderly woman passes round the girl's head a copper or brass platter with rice and water in it, throws the contents of the platter and also & broken egg and a cocoanut at the girl's feet, and welcomes her. The Bijapur Raddis, at the first ploughing of the season, rub the oxen's heads with cow-dung ashes, and bow before them.45 When a Brâhman bids neighbours to a thread-girding or to a wedding, the bidder drops red coloured rice into the hands of the chief person asked, and touches, with red powder and turmeric, the neck, hands and brows of the women of the house. In return, the women place in the bidder's lap, rice, a cocoanut and betel nuts and leaves. 46 The turning, which means the offering, of silver coins to the new moon is to scare fiends from the baby-moon. And Job's kissing of hands to the moon is the same as the Roman practice of blowing a kiss from the first finger tip.67
Of the great class of sacrificial salutes, which have for their object to secure the safety of the saluted by the saluter taking into himself the ill-lack of the saluted, the clearest example is the Rajput and other high class Hinda and Musalman women's salute in Gujarat. In Kacch, in 1819, when a distinguished visitor came to a village, the women of the half-priestly tribe of Chậrans formed a ring round him, and each woman joined the backs of her two hands, and
» Op. cit. Vol. XVIII. p. 279. 9 Burton's Mission to Dahomey, Vol. I. p. 149. 19 Yule's Cathay, p. clxiii. 4 Hone's Table Book, p. 187. 46 Op. cit. Vol. XV. pp. 152, 153,
$ Hone's Table Book, Vol. I. p. 890. 41 Jowett's Dialogues, Vol. II. p. 498. 43 Harris' Africa, p. 101. 48 Bombay Gaxetteer, Vol. XXIII. p. 147. #7 Napier's Folk-Lore, p. 98; Job, xxxi, 26.
