The Hands and Feet.
The hands and feet are also means by which Bhûts enter the body. Hence much of the ablution at prayers and meals; the hand-clapping which accompanies so many religious and mystical rites; the passing of the hand over the head; the laying of the hands on the eyes to restore sight, of which we have many examples in the Indian folk-tales; the hand-pledging at marriages; the drinking of the Charan-amrita, or water, in which the feet of a holy man have been washed; the ceremonial washing of the feet of the bridegroom at a wedding by the father of the bride. The stock case of the danger of the not washing the feet at night is that of Adilî, whose impurity allowed Indra to form the Maruts out of her embryo. A man with flat feet is considered most unlucky, as in North England, where if you meet a flat-soled man on Monday you are advised to go home, eat and drink, or evil will befall you.[23] The chief basis of feet-washing is the idea that a person coming from abroad and not immediately carrying out the required ablution runs the risk of bringing some foreign, and presumably dangerous, spirit with him.
The Ears.
And so with the ears, which are believed to communicate direct with the brain, and are kept by the rustic carefully muffled up on chilly mornings. Hence the custom of Kanchhedan, or ear-piercing, which is in Northern India about the only survival of the world-wide rite of mutilation when males attain puberty, and of wearing ear-rings and similar ornaments, which is habitual with all classes of Hindus, and specialized among the Kanphata Jogis, who take their name from this practice.
Varieties of Bhûts.
In Bengal the ordinary Bhût is a member of the Kshatriya, Vaisya, or Sûdra class. The Brâhman Bhût, or Brahmadaitya, is quite another variety. The ordinary Bhûts are as tall as palmyra trees, generally thin and very black. They usually live on trees, except those which the Brahmadaitya frequent. At night, and especially at the hour of midnight, they wander about the fields frightening travellers. They prefer dirty places to those which are clean; so when a person goes to worship a Bhût, he does so in some dirty, retired place, and gives him only half-cooked food, so that he may not have time to gobble it up, and perchance rend his worshipper. They are never seen in the temples of the gods, though they often, as we have seen, lurk about in the vicinity in the hope of getting some of the offerings if the priest be not on the alert and scare them with his bell or shell-trumpet. They are always stark naked, and are fond of women, whom they sometimes abduct. They eat rice, and all sorts of human food, but their favourite diet is fish. Hence no Bengâli, except for a considerable bribe, will talk about fish at night. Here they agree with the fairies of Manxland. Professor Rhys[24] tells a story of a Manx fisherman, who was taking a fresh fish home, and was pursued by a pack of fairy dogs, so that it was only with great trouble he reached his own door. He drove the dogs away with a stone, but he was shot by the fairies, and had a narrow escape of his life. On the other hand, the Small People in Cornwall hate the smell of fish as much as the savour of salt or grease.[25] The best chance of escape from these Bengal Bhûts is when they begin to quarrel among themselves. A person beset by them should invoke the gods and goddesses, especially Kâlî, Durgâ, and Siva, the last of whom is, as already noted, the Lord of Bhûts.[26]
Bhûts are of many varieties. Vetâla, or Baitâl, their leader, is familiar to everyone in the tales of the Baitâl Pachîsi. He is not, as a rule, particularly offensive. More usually he is a vagrant Bhût which enters the body of a man when the real spirit is absent. But he often approximates to the Vampire as we meet him in Western folk-lore. “It is as a vitalized corpse that the visitor from the other world comes to trouble mankind, often subject to human appetites, constantly endowed with more than human strength and malignity.”[27] Thus in one of Somadeva’s stories the hero goes at night to a cemetery and summons at the foot of a tree a Vetâla into the body of a man, and after worshipping him, makes an oblation of human flesh to him. In another there is a Vetâla with a body made up of the limbs of many animals, who hurls the king to the earth, and when he sits on the Vetâla’s back the demon flies with him through the air like a bird and flings him into the sea.[28] The spirit entering the body of the dead man forms the leading incident in the tale of Fadlallah in the Arabian Nights, and there are many instances of it in Indian folk-lore. This disposes of the assertion which has been sometimes made that among races which bury their dead little is known of regular corpse spectres, or that they are special to lands tenanted or influenced by the Slavonians.[29] Most usually the Vetâla appears as the spirit of some living person dissatisfied with his lodgings on earth, which leaves his own body and occupies a corpse in preference. He, in company with the Vasus, Yakshas, Bhûtas, and Gandharvas, has passed into the degraded Tantrika worship.[30]