These comments, however, merely contain a warning not to stretch too widely a partial explanation of the origin of evil spirits. The race-origin of the lesser malignant spirits may not account for the existence of the Vedic giants and demons. Neither has anyone attempted to do so. There is, however, no doubt that several of the myths of bhuts and dâkans, giants and dwarfs, are connected with traditions of hostile races. Folklore throws considerable light on this question and a good deal of evidence has been brought forward by Grimm and other folklorists. Tylor has endorsed this evidence and the influence of the hostility of races on the beliefs of people in many lands is very skilfully examined by Sir Laurence Gomme in a chapter entitled the “Mythic influence of a conquered race” in his Ethnology of Folklore, and also in a chapter on “Ethnological conditions” in his later work, Folklore as an Historical Science. For our present purpose one or two examples from Indian Folklore will suffice. On Bombay side, when a person is possessed, generally the evil spirit is of a low caste, a Mahar, or Bhanghi or a Mochi or a Pinjari. The dâkans (witches) who haunt our wayside wells and trees and cemeteries also belong to such low castes, as Kolis, Vaghris and Charans. The mountain ranges and jungle tracts of Southern India are still inhabited by semi-savage tribes, who, there is good reason to believe, once held the fertile open plains. As pointed out by Walhouse in the Journal of the Anthropological Society, the contempt and loathing in which they are ordinarily held, are curiously tinctured with superstitious fear; for they are believed to possess secret powers of magic and witchcraft and influence with the old malignant deities of the soil who can direct good or evil fortune. To this day the people of Chota Nagpur believe that the Moondahs possess powers of sorcery and can transform themselves into tigers and other beasts of prey with a view to devouring their enemies. Similarly, the Kathodis are believed to transform themselves into tigers. Many closely parallel beliefs can be quoted from the history of demonism in the western world and Sir Laurence Gomme points out that the general characteristics of the superstitions brought about by the contact between the Aryan conquerors of India and the non-Aryan aborigines are also represented in the cult of European witchcraft. Underneath the emblems of the foreign civilisation lie the traditional custom and belief, “the attributes of the native uncivilisation.”
A notable illustration is given by Evans Wentz in Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. The only true Cornish Fairy, says the author, is the Piksy, of the race which is the Pohel Vean or Little People, and the Spriggan is only one of his aspects. The Piksy would seem to be the “Brownie” of the Lowland Scot, the Duine Sith of the Highlanders, and if we may judge from an interesting note in Scott’s Pirate, the “Peight” of the Orkneys. If Duine Sith really means “the Folk of the Mounds (burrows),” not the “People of Peace,” it is possible that there is something in the theory that Brownie, Duine Sith, and “Peight,” which is Pict, are only in their origin ways of expressing the little dark-complexioned aboriginal folk who were supposed to inhabit the burrows, cromlechs, and allées couvertes, and whose cunning, their only effective weapon against the mere strength of the Aryan invader, earned them a reputation for magical powers.[51]
Let us now see how far this view of the case helps us in understanding the Parsi beliefs in the Mahomedan guardian spirits of wells, to which reference has already been made. The relations of the Parsis with the Hindus and Mahomedans in the land of their adoption were not exactly those of conquered aborigines to the conquerors, but were, until the advent of the English, practically the same as those of subject races to the rulers. It was, however, no case of contact with a higher culture, rather it was the case of assimilation of a ruder culture. No doubt, the Parsis had taken to India from their ancient home a belief in the existence of a presiding genius of water. That, however, was a belief considerably different from that which in India gave the water-spirits a local habitation and a name. But by long contact with the Hindus and Mahomedans the community came to believe in several local deities and absorbed several local rituals. No doubt, the primary factor in inducing this recognition and worship of local deities was the fear of their power to do harm, but with it must also have been blended the desire to please the neighbouring communities and the hope of receiving favours at the hands of the spirits if properly adored and propitiated.
This it was that seems to have led many a Parsi in the mofussil to offer oil at the temple of Hanuman or to take flowers to the shrines of Mahomedan saints, whose aid they sought and who did not fail to appear to them, warning them and directing them, mostly in dreams. When they went to Bombay they had already absorbed the Hindu ideas concerning the spirits lurking in or near deserted tanks and wells and regarded them as the haunts of evil spirits such as dâkans and sankhinis, bhuts and prets. When, however, they dug wells in their own houses, in the absence of any well-spirit in the Zoroastrian pantheon and in the absence of any Hindu guardian-spirits of household wells, they appear to have invariably peopled their private wells with sayyids and pirs in whose virtues they had already come to believe and whom they had already venerated at their shrines and whom it was thus convenient for them to honour in their own houses by giving them a sthan or thanak in their wells.
Thus we see that what was at first a purely Scriptural belief in the sanctity of water and its presiding genius is now a medley of many divergent elements owing to the fusion of divers local traditions with the fundamental tribal belief during the long intercourse of the community with the Hindus and Mahomedans. There is no country in the world where people live under more varied social and religious conditions and where they are more exposed to the influence of neighbours than in India and of all the cities of this cosmopolitan country there is none more cosmopolitan than the city of Bombay.
Possibly, if we carry on local research in the Bombay Presidency and try to localise the beliefs and customs concerning well-worship, a good deal of fresh light may be thrown on this question. The work is by no means very difficult and with the aid of European folklorists, who have already shown us the way, it should be easy to carry on research throughout India. Sir Laurence Gomme, for instance, has given us in a luminous chapter on the localisation of primitive beliefs, a very skilful analysis of the different phases in which water-worship is still found in the United Kingdom. All the survivals of this cult he has allocated and explained by their ethnological bearing.
CHAPTER XIV.
ANALYSIS OF THE BRITISH CULTS.
Commencing with the Teutonic centres of England, Sir Laurence Gomme shows that the middle and south-eastern counties almost fix the boundary of one form of well-worship, a form which has lost all local colour, all distinct ritual, and remains only in the dedication of the well or spring to a saint of the Christian Church, in the tradition of its name as a “holy well,” or else in the memory of some sort of reverence formerly paid to the waters, which in many cases are nameless. Proceeding from small beginnings where the survival of the ancient cult is represented by the simple idea of reverence for wells mostly dedicated to a Christian saint, he takes us through stages where a ceremonial is faintly traced in the well-dressing with garlands decked with flowers and ribbons, where shrubs and trees growing near the well are the recipients of offerings by devotees to the spirit of the well, where disease and sickness of all kinds are ministered to, where aid is sought against enemies, where the gift of rain is obtained, where the spirits appear in general forms as fairies and in specific form as animal or fish, and finally, it may be in anthropomorphic form as Christian saints, where priestesses attend the well to preside over the ceremonies. With the several variants overlapping at every stage and thus keeping the whole group of superstition and custom in touch, one section with another, he shows that there is every reason to identify this cult as the most widespread and the most lasting in connection with local natural objects. He points out, moreover, that it is in the Celtic-speaking districts where the rudest and most uncivilised ceremonial is extant, and further, that it is in the country of the Goidelic or earliest branch of the Celts, where this finds its most pronounced types.