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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[SEPTEMBER, 1897.
In the Bombay Presidency, the Konkán is the place which most abounds in spirits, and where spirit-worship, as well as the popular belief in the power of spirits to do evil, is strongest. So much is this the case that an account of Konkan spirits includes details of almost all the spirits that are worshipped in the Presidency. Konkan spirits may be grouped under five classes - spirits of the fire, air, earth, water and under-world.
Fire Spirits.-Agni or Fire-spirits were familiar in early India. The Mahabharata tells how, out of the fire-sacrifice a spirit stepped and gavo Daśaratha the holy food which his wives ate and gave birth to Rama and his brothers. In the Konkân, fire-spirits, except Vija or Lightning, are mainly represented by Agya Vêtâl, Fiery Vetal. Agya is a higher form of the ordinary village Vêtal. Where he is found he is treated as the minister, kár hári, of the Monkey-God Hanuman. He is lodged in Hanaman's shrine in a rough red stone, somewhat lower than the image of Hanuman. Agya dresses in green, rides a green horse, loves a green sward. His henchman is Mhaisasur, the buffaloe-spirit, and under the henchman is a large escort. The host marches at night, each spirit in the host carrying a torch. All can see the torch light: the initiated alone, the priestess and the medium, see the forms of the god and his attendants. This spiritual insight is not gained without weeks of laborious rites perforined before a human corpse hung head down from a branch. If the rites please Agya he enters the corpse and speaks. Ägya's great day comes when a no-moon falls on a Tuesday. In Bombay, Agya's best known shrine is at the top of the Sidi Rasta or Ladder Road up the sonth-east face of Malabar Hill, close to the Ladies' Gymkhana. Ganga Bai, the priestess into whom the spirit of Âgya at times comes, says that the loss of the green glade, now the Gymkhana, so wounded Agya that he now rarely possesses her.
Air Spirits. - The sameness between airs and spirits, the strength, formlessness, and caprice of the wind, its angry howlings, its kindly rustlings have led mankind to agree that ,he broeze is a spirit, and that a spirit rides in the storm and dances in the whirlwind. The fifteenth century Swiss mystic Paracelsus said the autumn air is not so full of Aies as it is of spirits. In the Konkán, breath or breeze (wúra) is almost as common a name for a ghost as bhit, that which has been, or as prélá, that which has gone forth. So in cases of possession the patient or the medium is the jhudk or tree whose branches the spirit sways, and of whon, when he tosses the patient, the people say khéltá, he plays. So his breath is one of the spirits that lives in a man. God breathed into Adam the breath of life. The Australian word for soul and for brenth is the same - rang.24 The German Goddess Perchta or Bert ha breathed on a girl and struck her dumb.25 The Norwegians had an illness called alrgust, elf-breath.20 At the tomb of the modern idiot saint, 'Ali-al-Bayri, people catch the air in their hands and thirst it into their bosoms and pockets.27
Under spirits of the air comes the astral or star-spirit, perhaps as old as Chaldean starworship (B. C. 4000-2004). These astral spirits were supposed to be of the same substance as the stars. They were mortal, returning to their essence after 300 to 1,000 years. Each man and each planet had a star-spirit. Other star-spirits were unattached, roaming as they pleased. These were the sweet or the angry influences, which the stars sent to earth, as they
Antiquities, pp. 1383, 1384). The Polynesians and Red Indians believed in a soul, au airy substance in humon or animal form that rose from the body of the dying. The soul passed west beyond the sea or hovered over the tomb or wunk into the under-wo:ld (Rovillo's Les Religions der Perples Non-Cinilises, Vol. 11. p. 92). In England, vaubaptised children were believed to become ghosts. The noise mado in their south flight by the bean gecre (A, segelau)kuownas Gabriel's Hounds, is supposed to be the calling of the spirits of unbaptised children (Henderson's Full-Core, p. 131). The souls of tribesmen are friendly, the souls of hostile tribes unfriendly, and among tribesmen be souls of the unburied and of the bad are hostile (Spencer's Principles of Sociology, Vol. I. p. 196).
25 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 121. 2 Reville's Les Religions des Peuples Non-Civilin's, Vol. III. p. 157. 35 Grimm's Teutonic Mythology. Vol. I. p. 278. * Op. cit. Vol. II. p. 461. * Pool's Arabic Society in Middle Ages, p. 69.
