The Ghostly Army.
Closely connected with this are the numerous legends of the Ghostly Army. Thus, at Faizâbâd, the country people point out a portion of the Queen’s highway along which they will not pass at night. They say that after dark the road is thronged with troops of headless horsemen, the dead of the army of Prince Sayyid Sâlâr. The great host moves on with a noiseless tread; the ghostly horses make no sound; and no words of command are shouted to the headless squadrons. Another version comes from Ajmer. There for some time past a troop of four or five hundred horsemen, armed and dressed in green, issue from a valley in the neighbourhood of the city, and after riding about for some time, mysteriously disappear. They are believed to be the escort of the Imâm Husain, whose tragical fate is commemorated at the Muharram.
The same idea prevails all through India, and indeed all the world over. The persons killed at a recent disastrous railway accident haunt the locality, and have caused the breakdown of other trains at the same place.[70] The ghosts of the battle of Chiliânwâla began to appear very shortly after the battle, and Abul Fazl mentions the ghosts of Pânipat in the days of Akbar.[71] In America the anniversaries of the battles of Bunker’s Hill, Concord, Saratoga, and even as late as that of Gettysburg, are celebrated by spectral armies, who fight by night the conflict o’er again.[72] If you walk nine times round Neville’s Cross, you will hear the noise of the battle and the clash of armour, and the same tale is told of the battle of Marathon, which a recent prosaic authority attributes to the beating of the waves on the shore, while others say that these spectral armies of the sky are nothing more than wild geese or other migratory birds calling in the darkness.[73]
Masân.
Masân, the modern form of the Sanskrit Smasâna, “a place of cremation,” is the general term for those evil spirits which haunt the place where they were forced to abandon their tenements of clay. So the modern Italian Lemuri are the spirits of the churchyard and represent the Lemures or Larvæ, the unhappy ghosts of those who have died evil deaths or under a ban, to which there are innumerable allusions in the Latin writers.[74] In India Masân is very generally regarded as the ghost of a child, and we have already seen that some tribes regard an infant as a Bhût. He is occasionally the ghost of a low-caste man, very often that of an oilman, who, possibly from the dirt which accompanies his trade, is considered ill-omened. By another account such ghosts prowl about in villages in the Hills in the form of bears and other wild animals.[75] Others say that Masân is of black and hideous appearance, comes from the ashes of a funeral pyre, and chases people as they pass by. Some die of fright from his attacks, others linger for a few days, and some even go mad. “When a person becomes possessed of Masân, the people invoke the beneficent spirit of the house to come and take possession of some member of the family, and all begin to dance. At length some one works himself up into a state of frenzy, and commences to torture and belabour the body of the person possessed by Masân, until at length a cure is effected, or the patient perishes under this drastic treatment.” Khabish resembles Masân in his malignant nature and his fondness for burial grounds. He is also met with in dark glens and forests in various shapes. Sometimes he imitates the bellow of a buffalo, or the cry of a goatherd or neatherd, and sometimes he grunts like a pig. At other times he assumes the disguise of a religious mendicant and joins travellers on their way; but his conversation is, like that of ordinary Bhûts, always unintelligible. Like Masân, he often frightens people and makes them ill, and sometimes possesses unfortunate travellers who get benighted.[76]
Children afflicted by Masân are said to be “under his shadow” (chhâya), and waste away by a sort of consumption. Here we have another instance of the principle already referred to, that the shadow represents the actual soul.[77] This malady is believed to be due to some enemy flinging the ashes from a funeral pyre over the child. The remedy in such cases is to weigh the child in salt, a well-known demon scarer, and give it away in charity. The cremation ground and the bones and ashes which it contains are constantly used in various kinds of magical rites. It is believed when thieves enter a house, that they throw over the inmates some Masân or ashes from a pyre and make them unconscious while the robbery is going on. This resembles the English “Hand of Glory,” to which reference will be made in another connection. As to the influence by means of the shadow, it may be noted that a Nepâl legend describes how a Lâma arrested the flight of a Brâhman by piercing his shadow with a spear, and the Râkshasî Sinhikâ used to seize the shadow of the object she desired to devour and so drag the prey into her jaws.[78]