Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/460

420 variants. So closely do we find the two ideas conectedconnected [sic], that I have sometimes thought that the whole notion of the miraculous vehicle and its concomitants is nothing but an expansion of the heroic leap, which in its turn is a mere popular exaggeration of some actual feat. In the Legends the idea of personally flying through the air is extended to making a saint's shoe to fly through the air in order to punish the saint's opponent by beating him. This causing of things to move miraculously is to be further seen in the common miracle of a saint moving his tomb from one place to another, leading to the quaint practice, observed by my- self in Hindu India, Buddhist Burma, and even Japan, of chaining an image to prevent its returning to the place whence it miraculously migrated.

The value of invocation or calling together the tribe and its defenders by a loud cry or sound must necessarily have been a very early human observation; and its importance and weird suddenness when used has all the world over led to some fanciful and pretty notions as to magical music and enchanted instruments, dependent chiefly on the observed or fancied influence of musical sound on the animal world. In these Legends there are distinct evidences of the history of the idea, and the chief use to which the magic flute, or its variant the magic conch, is there put is, where it is used by the secular hero, to call together the tribe and its friends, or where it is used by a saint or religious leader, to collect his following, celestial or terrestrial. Its secondary uses are to play upon the emotions of friendly animals, and to call to the aid of the hero the attention of the gods and the invisible inhabitants of the celestial worlds, who, where the hero is a saint, usually seem to occupy the place of his subordinates and assistants. The sound of the flute or conch seems also to have become mixed up in the popular mind with the "voice of prayer," for it can "reach to the Court of God," and so secure the divine intervention in human affairs.