A person under the influence of a charm is taken to a banyan tree with his hair wrapped round the head of a cock; the hair is cut off with a mantra, the bird nailed to the tree and the patient cured.
The charm known as Pilli is used to inflict immediate death; the sorcerer procures a dead body of a child, animal, bird, reptile or insect and goes at dawn, noon or midnight to a lonely spot where three roads meet or to a grave yard and lying on his back utters a mantra; the dead body becomes animated and it is given the name of the intended victim with directions to inflict on him a fatal wound: to stab, strangle, bite or sting him.
The charm called Angama causes the victim to throw up blood and it affects within seven hours; the sorcerer takes some article that the intended victim had worn or touched, goes to a lonely spot, charms it and touches the victim, or fans him with it or stretches it towards him, or keeps it in the hand and looks at his face or blows so that the breath may light on him or leaves it in some accessible place that it may be picked up by him.
The charm known as the Huniama is frequently practised and it takes effect within intervals varying from a day to several years; the sorcerer makes an image to represent the intended victim; nails made of five kinds of metal are fixed at each joint, and the victim’s name written on a leaf, or a lock of his hair, or a nail paring, or a thread from his dress inserted in its body; the image is charmed and buried where the victim has to pass and if he does so, he falls ill with swelling, with stiffness of joints, with a burning sensation in his body or with paralysis.
A Pilli or Angama charm can be warded off if the victim himself be a sorcerer when by a counter charm he can direct the operator himself to be killed or injured.
A Huniama charm can be nullified by getting a sorcerer either to cut some charmed lime fruits which have come in contact with the patient or to slit with an arekanut cutter a charmed coil of creepers placed round the patient’s neck, shoulders and anklets or to keep a charmed pumpkin gourd on the sorcerer’s chest while lying on his back and making the patient cut it in two with a bill hook, the parts being thrown into the sea or a stream; or to break up a charmed waxen figure and throw the pieces into boiling oil.
CHAPTER X.
DISEASE AND LEECHCRAFT.
Serious maladies are inflicted by spirits or induced by the vitiation of the triple force (vâta, pita, sema) which pervades the human body. In the former case they are cured by devil dances and in the latter by drugs. There are, however, numerous minor complaints where folk-remedies are employed.