Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/446

 4o6 The Folklore in the Legends of the Panjah.

sometimes by one of the stock devices for summoning the absent employed in folktales.

Now saints and all the supernatural powers that be can injure as well as aid, can curse as well as bless ; and beings that can injure need propitiation. So we find offerings made to the saints without reference to the faith or creed of either giver or receiver, such as milk, the most important beverage of all in the Panjab, precisely as it is offered to Mother Earth. At the same time we have a remarkable instance of propitiation by abuse in the story of Puran Bhagat, where a woman deliberately abuses and curses her patron saint, with the avowed object of extorting favours from him. This notion, though somewhat startling, is widely spread. Propitiation is naturally usually prescrip- tive, i.e. it is usually employed towards one special pro- tector or class of protectors ; but it as naturally constantly loses that character, and becomes general and even vicarious ; as when the heroine pours out libations first to the God of the Waters and then to the birds and beasts, an act of general charity likely to be welcome to the gods.

In close connection with the notion of general or pro- miscuous propitiation, there is a variety of terms in the vernaculars, which are usually translated by " alms-giving, generosity, charity," and so on ; but their real import is the making of propitiatory gifts or offerings to saints and priestly or holy personages. Generosity in the East does not convey the idea of lavishness in gifts generally, but in gifts to saints or priests. In this sense it is perhaps the most largely extolled virtue of all in fable and story, and of set purpose. This universal inculcation of the virtue of what may be called ceremonial generosity does not arise altogether out of any superstitious, religious, or folklore custom, but out of the necessities of the bards and the tellers of tales about saints. Shrines and their attendants have to be supported and means must be gathered to support them ;