Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/459

Rh about some of them, they are not sure which, and they never remember them accurately.

The most wide-spread and familiar, but perhaps not the best recognised, article subjected to supernatural agency is holy water, as common in India under Islam and Hinduism as it is in Europe under Christianity. In the Legends its uses are to invoke "the blessing of the great saints" and to effect miraculous cures—uses that will recall ideas current outside of heathenism. Much of the virtue of holy water is transferred in the popular mind to blood, especially human blood, which is the main folk-agency for miraculous restoration to life and health, and a common one for the performance of a host of other marvellous feats. In the Legends these virtues are to a certain degree yet further extended to milk, and it is of interest to record that in them ambrosia or amrita not only turns up as the beverage of the gods, but also when pure as holy water, in a most remarkable passage in a Hindu story, where it is regarded as the blood of the Almighty:

In India, however, all water may be called in a sense holy. There water of itself purifies, an idea that still leads to an incalculable amount of disease and sickness. The rivers and pools are all more or less sacred, though some of course are pre-eminently so, and ceremonial bathing is a source of infinite gains to the priests and holy personages.

The enchanted miraculous vehicle is a very old and widely-spread folk-notion, and so we find all sorts of heroes, saintly and demoniacal, flying through the air, leaping the ocean, accomplishing a journey of months in a few paces, and proceeding about their business at any required rate of speed on a variety of unlikely articles, of which abnormally winged creatures, bulls, lions, horses, camels, and the like are but