Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/448

 4o8 The Folklore in the Legends of the Panjah.

these things are, however, the giving up of something outside the self, however valued or appreciated, and the idea can be easily extended to the yet greater virtue of the giving up of something that is within or part of the self. It has actually been so extended all over the world in the forms of asce- ticism and penance, and nowhere more recklessly and in- tensely, more wildly in fact, than in India. The virtues of austerity and expiatory self-sacrifice are most carefully extolled and inculcated throughout Indian folklore and in the Legends, and have led there and elsewhere to one practical result in the widely-spread custom of voluntary slavery for debt not only of self but of wife and children.

Gifts, offerings, sacrifices, penances, and the like may be called practical propitiation ; but several ways of reaching the same desirable goal supernaturally have been evolved by the superstitious peasantry of India, and the rest of the world too for that matter. Vows, i.e. promises to reward the supernatural powers invoked for acceding to prayers, and oaths, i.e. invocations to the same powers to witness the promises, are two prominent methods of pro- pitiating the all-powerful inhabitants of the unseen world, constantly in every language and in every national mind mixed up with each other. In the Legends we have the whole story of the idea : oaths which are vows and vows which are oaths, notices of the advantages of performing vows and oaths, the importance of keeping them, and the terrible penalties attached to their breach, especially if made to a deceased saint, or a shrine in which a bard is personally interested. A variant of the terrible tale of Jephthah's Daughter is to be found in the Legends.

In every case where it goes beyond being a mere invoca- tion to the supernatural powers the taking of an oath involves a ceremony deriving from the superstitions of the takers; and the ceremonies connected with the taking of oaths are there- fore not only interesting but nearly always valuable to the student. They are also varied to a limitless extent, and are