Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/462

422 occurs often enough in the folklore of the country. All the enchanted articles that occur are supposed to have already undergone the processes necessary to render them supernatural. Probably the audience is assumed to know what those processes were, and such charms as occur are all of the prophylactic nature already described.

Between the supernatural and unmistakable human being there has existed everywhere and at all times an intermediary, a being who, while obviously and distinctly human, has assumed or acquired certain unusual and therefore in the popular mind uncanny powers. His ordinary form is that of the priest, but the forerunner, and in early society the contemporary, of the priest is the being who is possessed, i.e. subjected to enchantment, magical, supernatural, or miraculous. Spirit-possession is not a desirable accident of life, especially as sudden, severe, or striking disease or illness is confounded with it; and hence the existence of the possessed has led to that of the exorcist or professional curer of the misfortune. The idea of possession and its antidote does not seem to have taken a strong hold of the Panjabi, and consequently not much of either appears in the Punjab Legends. Indeed, it is directly mentioned only in one place; but in many respects a remarkably similar series of legends from Kanara, which I have somewhat recently edited under the title of the Devil-Worship of the Tuluvas, mainly turns on it, as indeed does the whole complicated system of modern Tibetan Buddhism, exhibiting once more that common phenomenon in nature, the rudimentary existence only in one series of connected creatures of a part that is fully developed in another.

So far, we have been dealing with the heroes and their male counterparts, but on turning to the heroines it will be found that, so far as Indian ideas on the parts that the sexes are capable of playing in the affairs of life admit, the stories of the female actors follow strictly on the lines of