Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/441

 The Principles of Fasting. 399

Among the Upper Thompson Indians in British Columbia, again, those who handled the dead body and who dug the grave had to fast until the corpse was buried.^

In several instances fasting after a death is observed only in the daytime.

David and his people fasted for Saul and Jonathan until even on the day when the news of their death arrived.- Among the Arabs of Morocco it is the custom that if a death takes place in the morning everyone in the village refrains from food until the dead is buried in the afternoon or evening ; but if a person dies so late that he cannot be buried till the next morning the people eat at night. In the Pelew Islands, as long as the dead is unburied, fasting is observed in the daytime but not in the evening.^ In Fiji after a burial the kana-bogi, or fasting till evening, is practised for ten or twenty days.^ In Samoa it was common for those who attended the deceased to eat nothing during the day, but to have a meal at night.'^ In the Tuhoe tribe of the Maoris, " when a chief of distinction died his widow and children would remain for some time within the whare potae [that is, mourning house], eating food during the nighttime only, never during the day."^ The Sacs and Foxes in Nebraska formerly required that children should fast for three months after the death of a parent, except that they every day about sunset were allowed to partake of a meal made entirely of hominy.'^ Among the Kansas a man who loses his wife must fast from sunrise to sunset for a year and a half, and a woman who loses her husband must

^Teit, 'Thompson Indians of British Columbia,' in Memoirs of the American Museum oj Natural History, Anthropology, i. 331.

"^2 Samuel, i. 12. Cf. ibid. iii. 35. ^Waitz, op. cit. v. 153.

"•Williams and Calvert, Fiji, p. 169.


 * Turner, A'ineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 228. Idem, Samoa, p. 145.

®Best, 'Tuhoe Land,' in Trans, and Proceed, of the New Zealand Institute, XXX. 38.

'Yarrow, 'Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians,' in Ann. Pep. Bur. Ethn. i. 95