It need not be said that more summary measures were often taken with those who “walked” after death to the inconvenience of the survivors. They consisted in digging out and destroying the corpse, or dealing with it in a way similar to that used with vampires, which are indeed one species of these troublesome visitors. Examples are not uncommon in the Norse sagas, and are plentiful in the folklore of the Scandinavian and other countries.
An alternative to driving away the supernatural being is to threaten and insult him. Of this I have in previous pages given some examples. The ancient Greeks had a technical term for formulæ of this kind. They called them θεῶν ἀνάγκαι, compulsions of the gods. It will be sufficient to refer to a few cases of insult employed by different peoples in all seriousness, and often in the sacred ritual. When a sacrifice is offered to the ancestral manes by the Thonga of South-Eastern Africa on the occasion of sickness in the family, they are told: “You are useless, you gods; you only give us trouble! For although we give you offerings, you do not listen to us! We are deprived of everything! You [naming the ancestral spirit who is addressed as the cause of the evil] are full of hatred! You do not enrich us! All those who succeed do so by the help of their gods!” We are informed that when some great misfortune is the occasion for a special sacrifice, the request presented in the prayer is preceded or followed by a ritual insulting of the gods (manes). “There are two words used to designate this curious part of the prayer: holobela, to scold the gods, or rukatela, the real word for to insult.”[190.1] Here it must not be forgotten that the personages addressed are members of the family. It is true that they have been divinized by death, but their family relationship has not been dissolved. They have still their duties to perform, as well as the survivors; and if they neglect them a family quarrel may reasonably be the consequence, as it might in their lifetime.
This method of bullying divinities is well known in India. A pair of examples from the extremities of the peninsula will suffice. Parakutty is a debased form of Vishnu (or perhaps it may be more correct to say an aboriginal demon identified with Vishnu), worshipped by some of the low castes in Cochin. The Nayadis are a jungle tribe reputed to be skilful hunters. Parakutty is supposed to aid them in hunting. When they fail to get the expected game they abuse him for his ingratitude, and for betraying the trust they have reposed in him. He is also the favourite deity of the Parayans. A Paraya magician is frequently called in to assist in recovering stolen property. He invokes Parakutty for the purpose. If the property be not recovered the magician prays again, this time in a more indignant and abusive form, and he thinks that then his object is sure to be gained.[191.1] In The Legends of the Panjab, Sir R. C. Temple gives a long poem in which a woman in trouble expresses her intention of cursing her patron saint Gorakh Nâth for the misfortunes that have befallen her.[191.2] In the same spirit Charlemagne, in the romances, is made to threaten God to throw down his altars and make the churches with all their priests cease from the land of the Franks.[191.3]
Great and awful as gods may be, they are after all but human. The most mysterious of them are conceived in quasi-human terms. On the other hand, human beings are often looked upon as gods and treated accordingly. But then their treatment is simply that of powerful men, men possessed of and filled with a greater or less degree of mana, who therefore require to be handled gingerly, like an unexploded bomb. Such a man-god, if a native ruler or fellow-tribesman, can seldom be driven away; but he may, especially if his mana be suspected of departing from him, be attacked and slain. To expound this practice and the belief on which it is founded, or with which it is bound up, Dr Frazer’s great work, The Golden Bough, has been written. The white man, like the gods, is to peoples in the lower culture mysterious, powerful, endowed with mana. To that extent he is the object of wonder and fear, he is a god. Yet he may be fought and overpowered, killed or driven away. Of the Bangala in the Upper Congo basin we are told that before the unknown and mysterious the native “is timid, fearful, and very superstitious. He will regard you as a god, and yet try to fight you; he will superstitiously believe that you have wonderful occult powers that can stop the rain, cause pestilence and plagues; and yet he will not attempt to conciliate you, but he will savagely tell you to clear out of his town and take your witchcraft elsewhere.”[192.1]
So and not otherwise the savage treats his gods. Where milder means avail not, and he can get his way by rough treatment of the idols or other tangible forms in which they are presented, he does not hesitate to use physical force. As little will he hesitate to use guile to eke out his inferior strength. It is but another manifestation of his orenda. Hence the tales of audacious heroes who have measured their strength or their cunning against more tremendous personages. Hence the threats and insults addressed to powers beyond immediate reach by peoples all over the world. Hence the punishment inflicted on the images of gods and saints. Hence the boldness of the Celts.
THE HAUNTED WIDOW
According to the legend of Osiris as preserved for us by Plutarch, the slain divinity accompanied with Isis, his sister-wife, after his death, with the result that she had by him a child whose name is given in Greek form as Harpocrates.[194.1] Doubt has been thrown by some Egyptologists upon the accuracy of Plutarch’s report; but it is probably correct. At all events the incident is fairly widespread both in tale and superstition, as I shall proceed to show.
Among the Chinese the dead of both sexes have always been held capable of sexual intercourse with the living. A favourite topic of Chinese tales is that of a belated wanderer entertained by a liberal host or hostess and passing the time in agreeable conversation, eating, drinking, sleeping and sexual intercourse, and then suddenly awaking to find himself or herself, as the case may be, in or on a tomb, with no trace of human dwelling near. Visits are paid by the dead to the living for various purposes, from which the enjoyment of the pleasures of married life are not excluded. One famous story concerns a man of the Ma clan, who died childless, leaving a wife who refused to marry again. In her sorrow she caused to be made a clay image of the deceased and offered something to it whenever she took a meal, as she had done to her husband in his lifetime. One night the image became animated, and telling her that he was her husband permitted to return and solace her fidelity and chastity, he passed the night with her, rising at cockcrow and going away. The visit was repeated every night, with the result that before the end of a month she had conceived and in due time bore a son. Information was laid before the magistrate and the woman was arrested. On hearing her story the magistrate said: “I have heard that the children of ghosts are shadowless, and that those that have shadows are not genuine.” He took the child into the sunshine, and lo, its shadow was as faint as a light smoke. He further tested it by pricking its finger and putting the blood on the clay image of the woman’s husband, into which it soaked without leaving a trace, whereas smeared on another image it was wiped off at once. These experiments convinced the magistrate that the woman’s tale was true; and all traces of suspicion subsequently vanished when, as the boy grew up, he was found closely to resemble the deceased in face, gesture and speech.[195.1]
Gansám, a divinity worshipped by the Muásís and Gonds of Bengal, is said to have been a Gond chief who was devoured by a tiger just after his marriage at an early age. “Cut off at such a moment, it was unreasonable to suppose that his spirit would rest. One year after his death he visited his wife, and she conceived by him; and the descendants of the ghostly embrace are, it is said, living to this day at Amodah in the Central Provinces.” As a result of other apparitions to many of his old friends he persuaded them to inaugurate a regular worship of him, and two festivals in the year were established in his honour.[196.1] Not in all cases, however, do the deceased husband’s visits to his widow result in the birth of a child. The legend of Záhir Pir, the saint of a Mohammedanized caste of scavengers about Benares, relates that he was involved in strife with his mother’s sister’s sons, who disputed his succession to his father’s kingdom, and slew them. For this he was cursed by his mother never to see her face again. In his anguish he called upon Mother Earth to receive him into her bosom. On her refusal, because, being a Hindu, he was not burnt, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and accepted Islam. Afterwards renewing his petition, the earth opened and disclosed a chapel as for a hermit. Záhir Pir entered on his charger, and the earth closed above him and his devotions. Siryal, his widow, reduced with his mother to poverty, mourned him and cried: “Mother Earth, give me back my husband!” By God’s command the earth yielded him up to visit her nightly; but every morning at daybreak he flew away on his winged charger. Siryal had discarded her jewels as became a widow when she lost her husband. Now that she received these secret visits she resumed them as a matron. When her mother-in-law upbraided her, saying: “What means this wanton finery?” she returned: “To thee thy son is dead: to me my husband is alive.” In explanation of the riddle she placed her beneath the bedstead at night that she might see her son. But when Záhir Pir came at midnight his aged mother had fallen into a deep sleep, which was undisturbed by the caresses above her; nor was it until he had quitted the bed and vaulted into the saddle that Siryal could rouse her. She started up and clutched his bridle. Even then her curse prevented her from seeing her son’s face. “I do but obey thy bidding,” he groaned, turning his face away. “Look back! thy house is burning.”[197.1] So among the Calmucks we hear of a khan who, being married to a wife whom he did not love, resorted to a girl living a little distance away. His visits resulted in her pregnancy; but before the birth of her child he died. Death does not prevent him from carrying her off to his funeral rites, nor from afterwards paying her marital visits on the fifteenth of every month, and spending the night with her, disappearing in the morning. When she urges him to stay, so that his mother may see him and be convinced of her truth, he gives her directions to go to the place of the dead and fetch his heart. This she accomplishes, and thus recovers him as her husband permanently.[197.2] The islanders of the East Indian Archipelago are profoundly convinced that various kinds of spirits can have similar intercourse with human beings. The spirits of the dead are not excepted from this belief; and albinos are held to be their offspring by a living mother. A famous priest-king of the Toba-bataks, called Singa Mangaraja, owed his birth to this cause.[197.3]
A story is told by the Dene (Athapascans) of the northern provinces of Canada concerning a man who one night suddenly disappeared from his wife’s side, and in the morning, in the ashes of the hearth, were found the cloven footprints of a reindeer: he had been transformed. His wife was an adept in magic. By its aid she became an expert hunter, and after the loss of her husband supplied the family, consisting of her mother and little son, with food. As her son grew up, he in turn hunted and successfully snared reindeer. One day he caught a reindeer with human hair between its horns. He brought its carcase to his mother, who had constantly mourned her husband. She at once recognized the dead reindeer as her husband. Lying down along with it, the animal revived and once more became man. Thus she recovered the husband whom she had loved, and for whom she had so long sorrowed. The story is ætiological, told to explain why so many reindeer are caught with snares made of magical bonds of pine-root, and why certain parts of the reindeer are not eaten.[198.1]