Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/94

 66 The Powers of Evil in Jerusalem.

thankful that its hours were numbered. In certain districts it is very important that the animal should be slaughtered without injury to its bones, both at the sacrifice of redemp- tion and at that of circumcision ; cf Exodus xii. 46 and St. John xix. 36. One is daily coming across biblical reminders in this land of i^^^ changes.

It is said that sacrifices are offered also at weddings, especially at the entrance of a bride into her new home. This, however, I have not been fortunate enough to see, although I have attended many weddings, Moslem, Christian, and Jewish.^ This custom is sometimes, how- ever, otherwise interpreted.

Curtiss {op. cit., cvi.) quotes the Shech of a shrine who said to him, " Every building must have its death — man, woman, child, or animal. God has appointed a redemption for every building through sacrifice. If God has accepted the sacrifice, He has redeemed the house," and, further (cxiv.), that when the peasants go, as is the custom, to distant places to cultivate the ground for the Bedu, they offer a sacrifice to the spirit of the cave in which they take up their temporary residence, and that even a missionary of his acquaintance had a goat given to him by his land- lord, so that he might sacrifice it upon the flat roof and allow the blood to run down over the lintel. When a member of the family returns home from a journey, or a soldier from the war, it is usual to slay an animal between his feet as he crosses the doorstep. Mr. Richards, the English Consul of Damascus, relates that in a certain village he received an address of welcome, and at a given signal a sheep was slain in front of his horse.

In an earlier paper about Jewish customs ^ I have spoken of the hand which is almost invariably portrayed over the door of the house. This is sometimes found also upon a Moslem house, the sequel of some occasion of sacrifice —

^ Cf. Inner Jerusalem, chapters on Women among Moslems. "^ Folk- Lore, vul. xv., p. 189.