up on its handle." In a slightly more elaborate form of the majinai the broom is stood on its end in the room next to that in which the visitor is, a pair of sandals is laid out before it, and the operator says to it in a whisper "'There now, do please go away quickly.'"[1] In another form the operator stands a broom on end against a wall, wraps a towel round the brush (in order to cause the broom to resemble a person with a towel round his head, I was told; this, I imagine, like the setting out of the sandals, is intended to suggest a preparation to leave the house), and goes outside of the room in which it stands and beckons to it [Yokohama]. In still another form the broom, with a towel round the brush, is stood on end, and the operator fans the lower part of the handle and repeats, over and over again, the visitor's name and the phrase "please to go away."[2]
- ↑ J. E. de Becker, The Nightless City, 1905, p. 145.
- ↑ Among Jamaican Negroes, "If you wish a visitor to go away, take a broom and lean it up behind a door and sprinkle salt on it, and he will leave directly" ("B," in Folk-Lore, vol. xv. p. 206). This reminds us of the practice of the Wends of E. Prussia, who, when they wish to protect themselves against the "noxious influence" of wandering Gipsies, lay an old broom upon the threshold of the chamber-door and "Salz darauf [? the broom, or the threshold] streuen" (Kunze, op. cit. p. 161). In Thuringia, Lower Harz, Mecklenburg, and Saxon Switzerland, as Kunze records [loc. cit.), there is an association of the burning of a broom with the subsequent arrival of visitors (whom he chooses to identify with "böse Leute" or witches)—an association which (if it be not merely the effect of a boorish witticism based on the dirt the visitors are likely to bring into the house) would appear to be in some degree the converse of the basis of practices in which a broom is used to send visitors away. The East Anglian belief that "If you set the broom in a corner, you will surely have strangers come to the house" (R. Forby, Vocab. East Anglia, London, 1830, vol. ii. p. 414) would seem to be allied to these Germanic beliefs. The Carlsbad belief that the sweeping of a tavern at night after the guests have left will keep them away thereafter, and the Bulgarian belief that the sweeping of a shop in the evening will keep buyers away (Kunze, op. cit. p. 156), appear as if based on other conceptions than those we are at the moment discussing; these two beliefs, we may observe in passing, have had some practical considerations—such as the proprietor's convenience, his reputation for returning lost articles, and the cleanliness of his place—to support them, especially in small and backward communities.
