Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/178

164 Who are seen in the swelling and subsiding of the Blossom-sheath. The Blossom-sheath that is called Si Gedebeh, Seven Princesses who are Blossom-sheath's handmaidens."

The close parallelism between this latter charm and the charm employed in the ceremony of the dancing palm-blossom will, I think, be sufficiently obvious. It is, in each case, the soul or spirit of the palm which is invoked; in the one case that of the areca-palm, and in the other that of the cocoanut. In each case the spirit is seven-fold and female. And as in the case of the cocoanut-palm the object of the ceremony is to increase the yield of the cocoanut-palm, it seems a fair deduction to suppose that the areca-palm ceremony may once have been intended to increase the fertility of the palm in question.

In the case of the Dancing Rice-spoon described by Darwin, our information, for want of the charm, is too slight to enable us to conjecture with any certainty to which class of ceremonies the performance would belong. I should on the whole, however, be inclined to assign it to the first class, together with the ceremonies of the Dancing Pestle and Mortar, as a probable survival of a performance intended to conciliate the spirit of the rice, which, it must be remembered, is taken into the house at harvesting. The Rice-spirit itself is a good spirit, and the rice-spoon is consequently used not unfrequently as a weapon of defence against the Powers of Evil. Thus, a woman who is in labour at the time of an eclipse is seated in the doorway of the house with this implement in her hand to protect her from evil spirits. So, too, by way of protection from the spirits of the tempest, seafaring Malays are accustomed to fasten a spoon horizontally across the mast of their vessel, so that it points towards the centre of the storm cloud, repeating a charm as they do so. These last instances, however, belong to a different category, and are only cited as showing the ceremonial use of the rice-spoon as a protective implement in magic.