Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/342

 312 Correspondence.

Ornamental Patterns and Reincarnation.

I think the following facts may be interesting to the readers of Folk-Lore ; and I should be glad if any of them could give me further accounts of ornamental patterns connected with the doc- trine of re-birth.

In J. Sibree's Madagascar before the Cotiquest i^on^oVi : Fisher Unwin, 1895, p. 234) it is stated that the dona or pily (a half- mythical python) is "one of the fiercest of creatures ; it is big and long, and its skin is striped, so that makers of lamba (a native cloth) take it as a pattern for striped cloth." This shows how mistaken are the majority of writers on Madagascar in speaking of the patterns on the Malagasy lamba as originally and exclusively geometrical. Geometrical they are, of course, just as much as the patterns on the python's skin are geometrical ; if on lamba they are more, or only, geometrical, it is because both technique and the sense of symmetry led the Malagasy to geometrise the curved lines of the python's skin. Many learned authors, as Dr. Haddon, Mr. Grosse, &:c., have shown how geometrical ornament is a mere degeneration from patterns taken directly from nature.

The following passage from the Pere iVbinal's Vingt Ans a Afadagascar (Paris: Lecoffre, 1885, p. 243) shows the connection between the python-skin pattern and reincarnation. Among the Betsileo, he tells us, the soul of the heads of noble families goes into a. fanano {or more correctly fangany), i.e., a larva that becomes a large serpent (boa or python). The corpse of the dead was wrapped in a lamba ornamented with coloured woven patterns or with coloured glass beads. As the boa grows, he comes back into the village where his children and relatives are living, to seek them and ask them for food : " Et la famille le reconnaitra aux couleurs voyantes de sa robe, reproduction fidele des pedes colorees qu'on avait intercalees dans le tissu de son suaire."

Thus we have, so to speak, a circular process. The Betsileo choose python patterns for their lamba ; and these patterns (or glass-bead ornamentation) are to be seen on pythons in which the soul of the dead is reincarnated. Can we conclude from this fragmentary report that the patterns chosen had a bad or lucky influence, and a religious and magical meaning ?

A. VAN Gennep,