Should the thatch be pulled out unintentionally by a drunken man, he will only have to pay a goat for the purification ceremony. If, on the other hand, it is done with evil intent, the kiama, or council of elders, will fine the offender five goats. The writer is indebted to Mr Beech for bringing this example to his notice.
If a man goes to sleep at a strange village, and if the owner belongs to the same rika as himself, he is told to sleep in the hut of one of the wives of the owner. If this woman has lost a child and has not performed the usual purification ceremonies after a death, the man will return home with a thahu and will pass it on to the wife in whose hut he sleeps on his return home.
It is necessary for the hut to be purified as in the previous case, and then the man and his wife have also to be purified.
Again, if a wife goes and sleeps abroad and cohabits with a man who has assisted in the burial of a corpse or touched a corpse and not yet been purified, she will, on returning home, bring a thahu to her husband, and the same ceremony of lustration has to be undergone.
(68) The last of the Kikuyu thahu which will be quoted is one of some importance, as it may be, in primitive culture, the germ of one of the beliefs which affects the life of civilised peoples: this is the ill luck which is attached to the seventh day.
A herdsman will not herd his flocks for more than six days, and on the seventh must be relieved by another man.
If a man has been on a journey and absent for six days he must not return home on the seventh day, and must observe continence on the seventh day; rather than return to his village on that day he will go and sleep at the house of a neighbour a short distance away. If this law is broken, serious illness is certain to supervene and a medicine man (mundu mugo) has to be called in to remove the curse. Both sections of the [[126]]tribe are subject to it, and both male and female are affected. Moreover, the live stock of the offender will become sick.
This belief makes it easy for the missionaries to explain to the Kikuyu the meaning of the Christian observance of the Sabbath.
An important point in connection with thahu in Kikuyu which previously escaped notice is that an owner of a village, if he belongs to the Kikuyu circumcision guild, cannot enter or sleep in a hut which has been ceremonially purified until two days have elapsed, or for two months if he belongs to the Masai guild. This prohibition has a very practical effect, for in cases where the whole village has to be purified to rid it of some serious thahu the owner of the village would naturally be homeless for either two days or two months, as the case may be. To obviate this difficulty the purification ceremony is carried out in two instalments: one half of the village is done first, and a little later the medicine man returns and performs the lustration ceremony on the other half; the people are not thus greatly inconvenienced.
A variant of the word thahu in Kikuyu, which is often used by the old men, is nzahu.