purpose to make them bring offerings.[1] In China it is held that the multitudes of wretched destitute spirits in the world below, such as souls of lepers and beggars, can sorely annoy the living; therefore at certain times they are to be appeased with offerings of food, scant and beggarly; and a man who feels unwell, or fears a mishap in business, will prudently have some mock-clothing and mock-money burnt for these 'gentlemen of the lower regions.'[2] Notions of this sort are widely prevalent in Indo-China and India; whole orders of demons there were formerly human souls, especially of people left unburied or slain by plague or violence, of bachelors or of women who died in childbirth, and who henceforth wreak their vengeance on the living. They may, however, be propitiated by temples and offerings, and thus have become in fact a regular class of local deities.[3] Among them may be counted the diabolic soul of a certain wicked British officer, whom native worshippers in the Tinnevelly district still propitiate by offering at his grave the brandy and cheroots he loved in life.[4] India even carried theory into practice by an actual manufacture of demons, as witness the two following accounts. A certain brahman, on whose lands a kshatriya raja had built a house, ripped himself up in revenge, and became a demon of the kind called brahmadasyu, who has been ever since the terror of the whole country, and is the most common village deity in Kharakpur.[5] Toward the close of the last century there were two brahmans, out of whose house a man had wrongfully, as they thought, taken forty rupees; whereupon one of the brahmans proceeded to cut off his own mother's
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 122.
- ↑ Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 206.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. pp. 129, 416; vol. iii. pp. 29, 257, 278; 'Psychologie,' pp. 77, 99; Cross, 'Karens,' l.c. p. 316; Elliot in 'Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 115; Buchanan, 'Mysore, &c.,' in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 677.
- ↑ Shortt, 'Tribes of India,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 192; Tinling, 'Tour round India,' p. 19.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 101.
