Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/447

 The Principles of Fasting. 405

trian books Ormuzd is represented as saying: "In a house when a person shall die, until three nights are completed . . . nothing whatever of meat is to be eaten by his relations " ; ^ and the obvious reason for this rule was the belief that the soul of the dead was hovering about the body for the first three nights after death.-

Closely related to this custom is that of the modern Parsis, which forbids for three days all cooking under a roof where a death has occurred, but allows the inmates to obtain food from their neighbours and friends,^ Among the Agariya, a Dravidian tribe in the hilly parts of Mirzapur, no fire is lit and no cooking is done in the house of a dead person on the day when he is cremated, the food being cooked in the house of the brother-in-law of the deceased.'* In Mykonos, one of the Cyclades, it is considered wrong to cook in the house of mourning, hence friends and relatives come laden with food, and lay the " bitter table." "^ Among the Albanians there is no cooking in the house for three days after a death, and the family are fed by friends.'' So also the Maronites of Syria "dress no victuals for some time in the house of the deceased, but their relations and friends supply them." ^ When a Jew dies all the water in the same and adjoining houses is instantly thrown away ; ^ nobody may eat in the same room with the corpse, unless there is only one room in the house, in which case the inhabitants may take food in it if they interpose a screen, so that in eating they

^ ijhdyast Ld-Shdyast, xvii. 2.

'■'West, in Sacred Books of the East, v. 382, n. 3.
 * West, ibid. v. 382, n. 2.

■•Crooke, Tribes a fid Castes of the North-Western Provinces, i. 7. '^Bent, Cyclades, p. 221. *von Ilahn, Albanesische Studien, p. 151.

'Dandini, 'Voyage to Mount Liljanus,' in Pinkerton, Collection of Voyages, X. 290,


 * ' Allen, Modern fwiaism, p. 435.