Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/34

 24 The Legends of Krishna,

they come of age, from touching either heaven or earth.^ We have, again, the common custom of hanging masks on trees, which swing about and are supposed to promote their fertiUty — the Oscilla of Rome and the Dozzils of parts of England.- A bull-roarer is swung in the same way in the neighbourhood of Torres Straits as a fishing charm, and in Celebes dolls are hung on trees to protect the fruit. '^ In the same class is probably the cult of Aparchomeme, the " hanging " Artemis. The children, we are told, hung up images of Artemis, and the men of Kaphyae stoned them. The angry goddess smote their wives with sore disease, and thus the cult of the Hanging Artemis came to be instituted. We find also the same idea in the worship of Helene Dendritis.*

It shows itself in India in the custom of hanging up little cots on trees as a remedy for disease. In Madras when cholera appears, a swing is put up in the shrine of Bhan- garma and worshipped.^ In fact, the idea seems to have generally prevailed that the swinging of anything before a god, from the hook-swinging of a devotee to the whirling Dervishes, was a mode of propitiating the divinity, every part of the person or thing offered being brought in succes- sion into the immediate view of the god. Thus, we have in India the Evil Eye protectives of swinging lamps, rice pounders, and what not, round the head of the married pair. The Nahuas of Western America swung censers before their images and before the sun,*^ and the swinging censer has come down to the Christianity of our own days. It is no doubt in consonance with some ancient rite of propitia-

' Frazer, Golden Botigh, i., 223 seqq.

- Vergil, Georgics, i., 382 seqq.; Smith, Dictionary of A^itiquities, ii., 305; Folklore, vii., 399.

"^ Journal of the Anthropological Institnie, xix., 406.

" Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, ii., 428, 634; Pausanias, vi., 22, 5.

^ Crooke, loc. cit., i., 97 ; Oppert, Original Inhabitants of Bharutavarsha, 154.

•^ Bancroft, loc. cit., ii., 318.