That said the minister would die sune;
The minister died, and the fouk o’ the toun
They brant the weaver wi’ the wadd o’ the lume,
And ca’d it weel-waned on the warloch loon.[4]
With this is intimately connected the belief in the Evil Eye, and that certain persons have the power of calling down on their enemies the influence of evil spirits; and, as in Western lands, such a power is often attributed to persons afflicted with ugliness, deformity, crankiness of temper, liability to sudden fits of passion, epilepsy, and the like. Disease or death, famine, accident, or any form of trouble, never, in popular belief, come naturally. There is always behind calamity some malignant power which selects the victim, and the attribution of this faculty to any one naturally regarded as uncanny, or who practises rites or worship strange to orthodox belief, is in the opinion of the rustic only reasonable.
The Jigar Khor.
One particularly dreaded form of witch is the Jigar Khor or liver-eater, of whom Abul Fazl gives a description: “One of this class can steal away the liver of another by looks and incantations. Other accounts say that by looking at a person he deprives him of his senses, and then steals from him something resembling the seed of a pomegranate, which he hides in the calf of his leg; after being swelled by the fire, he distributes it among his fellows to be eaten, which ceremony concludes the life of the fascinated person. A Jigar Khor is able to communicate his art to another by teaching him incantations, and by making him eat a bit of the liver cake. These Jigar Khors are mostly women. It is said they can bring intelligence from a long distance in a short space of time, and if they are thrown into a river with a stone tied to them, they nevertheless will not sink. In order to deprive any one of this wicked power, they brand his temples and every joint of his body, cram his eyes with salt, suspend him for forty days in a subterraneous chamber, and repeat over him certain incantations.”
Of the modern Jigar Khors of the Panjâb we are told that when a witch succeeds in taking out a man’s liver, she will not eat it for two and a half days. If after eating it she is put under the influence of an exorciser, she can be forced to take the liver of some animal and put it back to replace that taken from the original victim.[5] In one of the tales of Somadeva the wicked wife of the barber is a witch, and when he is asleep she takes out his entrails and sucks them, and then replaces them as before.[6]