48 Asimis in Tegulis.
Grimm, op. cit. p. 458, for the second form of the custom, " kann einer nicht sterhen, so darf man nur drei siegel im dach aufhebeu,'" and for the former, Folk-Lore, vol. xvii. p. 370; cf. in general, Hartland in Hastings, E.R.E., art. "Death," p. 415^. It is, as has been sufficiently made clear by Frazer and others, an attempt to provide an exit for the soul, which it may use without polluting any of the ways used by living men. An equally obvious idea, when the structure of the house is simple, is to pull down a little of one wall, a device very like that employed by the Greeks when they welcomed an Olympic victor home through a gap in the city wall, because he was too important to come in by the commonplace gate. Given a stoutly-built house with a strong, weather-proof roof, one does not generally make a real hole, or if one does, it is more or less permanent. Hence we get various devices, as the corpse-door,^ the ceremonial removal of a limited number of tiles (as in the passage of Grimm just quoted, where the magic number three is prescribed), the opening of windows, and lastly, when the meaning of the custom, or at least the feeling of intense horror at the ghost has been lost, of doors also.
VI. llie Roof as the Path of Spirits. Among the Hopi,^ children are given a ceremonial whipping, inflicted by men disguised as katchina or spirits. The secret, that they are but disguised men, must be kept, however, from the younger children, who have not been through the ceremony. If it is not, real katchina will come, cut the babbler's head off, and throw it on the roof. Among the Zuni the same ceremony and the same prohibition are to be found, but with the subtle difference that the koko, as they are appro- priately called, will throw the severed head, not on to the roof, but to kothlmvela, the spirit-land. We have thus almost a mathematical proof of the equivalence, in the Arizona culture, of roof and spirit-world. If this were an isolated instance, it might be explained away ; but it is
^ H. F. Feilberg in Folk-Lore, vol. xviii. " Man, 1921, 58, p. 103.
