Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/442

 402 The Folklore in the Legends of the Punjab.

gathered round the Saints of Jalandhar, we are specially- treated to a relation of the " open and secret miracles of Sufi Ahmad of Jalandhar," and of the severe physical punish- ment of a woman for disclosing a secret miracle of another Jalandhar saint. In other instances, disease, and even hereditary madness, are attributed to divulgence of miracles secretly performed. Now, when one thinks over the enor- mous influence that the idea of ability to perform miracles secretly could be made to wield over the minds of a credulous and ignorant population, one wonders indeed that it does not more frequently crop up in Indian folklore ; unless its occurrence is to be regarded as an outgrowth of the idea of the punishment of idle curiosity so common in all folklore — the tales of Bluebeard's wives and so on — which again may perhaps be held to rest on the notion of tabu.

Miracles may be defined as wonders legitimately per- formed, while magic embraces the class of illegitimate wonders. The actual deeds, whether the result of miracu- lous powers or magical arts, seem to be much the same, and in India to be performed for much the same objects. The difference is that the one is right and holy, and the other is wrong and unholy. It is good to work marvels miraculously, but very bad to arrive at the same result by magic. And as, in the bard's eyes at any rate, all heroes, saintly or secular, are personages to be reverenced, one is not astonished at the very small part that magic is made to play in the Legends. Indeed, one scarcely ever sees it put forward as a mode of producing the innumerable marvels related. Magic is, how- ever, distinctly attributed in one instance to a daughter of the Serpents, but only for the purpose of moving a heavy stone, an object which, in the case of a saint, w^ould be related to have been achieved by a miracle. It is as dis- tinctly attributed in another instance to Gorakhnath, in circumstances where a miracle would seem to have been more appropriate, and in the midst of a host of miracles related of this great saint or holy man. Indeed, in this last