Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/452

 412 The Folklore in the Legends of the Punjab,

former consisting of change of form during life, and in the latter after death. The two ideas are very closely con- nected, so much so that the special changes represented by metamorphosis are based on the variety of bodies, that one and the same unfettered soul is assumed to be capable of vivifying.

In passing, it may be here mentioned that metempsychosis is in the Legends most ingeniously dragged in to defend the doctrine of sati, which is indefensible, except politically, even from the native scriptural point of view. A victim of the custom is made to say : " For many ages will I obtain the same husband," i.e. in reward for becoming sati. In the Legends, too, heroines are significantly made to commit sati, not only on husbands' but also on sons' deaths.

It will have been seen from what has been above said that saints scarcely differ from folktale heroes of the con- ventional sort. They are beautiful in appearance ; they have all sorts of secular occupations, even finding a liveli- hood as private soldiers and horse-dealers ; they have obvious foibles of their own ; they claim kingly rank on assuming saintship, make royal alliances, and keep up a royal state ; they are known by special and peculiar signs, they perform conventional heroic acts in an heroic super- natural manner. Indeed, just as the saint is hardly to be distinguished from the demon, so is he hardly to be dis- tinguished from the ordinary folk-hero. Indian demonolatry is ancestral or tribal hero-worship, and Indian hagiolatry is very little else. The saints and their demoniacal, heroic, or godlike counterparts are, however, essentially super- naturally endowed beings of the narrator's own nationality or party ; but there are in Indian folk-idea other super- naturally endowed beings, demoniacal in their nature and usually styled rakhas and translated " ogres," who belong as essentially to the enemy's party. In the demon world the bhiita, especially in South India, may be said to be always of the narrator's own class or side, and the rakhas to belong to the outside world ; while the demon proper