Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/461

Rh The power of enchanted human hair to assist human beings—perhaps as a spirit-haunt, to use Sir James Campbell's phrase—is another world-wide and very old notion, and again in the Legends we seem to get at an explanation of it, for it and its counterparty the insect's feeler, is of no avail until burnt, an idea arising probably from the palpable effect burnt hair has on those who become insensible from a blow or disease. The concrete idea, however, in burning hair appears to be to drive the spirits out of it by the process, and so compel them to your service; for the actual use of burnt hair is to call up invisible assistance. But when once the hair has started on its career as a power to interfere in the affairs of man, it is made to do a variety of things for him; for it can, among other things, cut down trees, burn up forests and enemies, and lead the heroine into her enemies' clutches. The outcome of the belief in the virtue inherent in hair has been a variety of Oriental beliefs and customs deriving directly from it:—e.g., the sacredness of the Musalman's beard and of the entire hair on the body of a Sikh.

To pass from a part to the whole, the great power possessed by enchanted human or animal bodies is invisibility. But I do not think its constant use in folktales and in these Legends is altogether due to a love of the miraculous. The notion gives such obvious opportunities for investing the heroes and actors with a deeper interest than they could otherwise be made to possess, and especially saints with additional supernatural powers for overawing those who listen to tales about them, that neither story-tellers nor bards have anywhere refrained from taking advantage of it. The practical use to which the power of invisibility is put in the Legends is to help on the development of the tales, or to assist the hero or the heroine in their desires, or to glorify a saint or holy personage.

Curiously enough the procedure of enchantment is not anywhere directly given in the Legends, though of course it