It might well be supposed that in the han-pa, if in nothing else, we have come across a piece of Chinese folk-lore that has no parallel in Europe; but perhaps our supposition would be unwarrantably hasty. I find that in the Highlands of Scotland "it was thought wrong to weep, lest the tears should hurt the dead."[248] Then again there is, or was, an English superstition against the use of certain feathers in feather-beds and pillows. The feathers of the domestic fowl, goose, pigeon, partridge, and sometimes those of wild birds generally, were tabooed.[249] No reason has been given so far as I know for this singular and apparently senseless idea, any more than for the Highland notion that tears were hurtful to the dead. It may be far-fetched to suppose on the strength of these old wives' tales that the shedding of tears over corpses was once believed by our own remote ancestors to turn dead men into feathered demons like the Chinese han-pa; but perhaps it might appear less unlikely that there is some extremely ancient and now forgotten connection between the British and the Chinese superstitions if we were able to find some traces of similar beliefs in the intervening countries of Europe or Asia.
For long I despaired of finding anything that might be regarded as a missing link; but Bohemia is the country that seems to have supplied it at last. The following letter will show that in Europe, as well as in Far Cathay, there still exists in our own generation the remnant of a belief that drought may in certain circumstances be caused by a human corpse, and that such a corpse is in some mysterious way associated with feathers.
"In the Bohemian village of Metschin," says a writer in Folk-lore,[250] "the body of the schoolmaster, who was buried early in May amid many marks of respect from the inhabitants, is to be exhumed. There, as elsewhere, a great drought prevails, and the story has got about that a cushion with feathers was put under his head. Nine-tenths of the population believe that this is the cause of the drought, hence the proposal to exhume him and remove the cushion, which is in reality filled with hay. Is this case parallel to the prejudice against the feathers of certain birds in beds and pillows, or is there some special connection between feathers and rain? More particularly in Australia feathers and hair are associated with rainmaking."
It will be noticed that in China the drought-causing demon grows the feathers on its own body, whereas in Bohemia it merely lies on a feathered pillow. That the two beliefs had a common origin, and that the two British superstitions already cited may be connected with them, will not, perhaps, be regarded as altogether beyond the bounds of possibility.
FOOTNOTES:
[214] The Religious System of China, vol. i. p. 212. For full details as to the procedure at Chinese funerals and the religious ceremonies connected therewith, the reader is referred to Dr. De Groot's monumental work, which deals minutely with this and kindred subjects.
[215] See p. [263]. Needless to say, the ancestral temples of great or wealthy families are on a very much grander scale.