Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/255



Excommunicated Persons.— Dumont, in his Voyage to the Levant (translated 1696), mentions two superstitions concerning excommunicated persons. In l. 10, pp. 116-7, he describes a fearful storm he encountered in a passage from Leghorn to Malta. The ship was struck by lightning, and her motion was so violent that "one of the Ship-Boys who lay sculking in the Fore-Castle, was thrown upon the Hatches in the other end of the Ship, and so bruis'd, and black with Contusions … that we have still reason to doubt of his recovery. The Mariners concluded that the Devil was the Author of all these Disorders, and that there was some Person in the Company under a Sentence of Excommunication." Again, in let. 22, p. 295: "You have doubtless observ'd that the Romanists have an extreme Veneration for those Persons whose Bodies remain free from Putrefaction after their death … whereas the Greeks pretend that 'tis only an Effect of Ex-communication; and when they find a Body in that Condition, they never leave Praying for the soul of the dead Person, till his Body be putrefy'd and corrupted."

Turkish Superstition.—"I shall in the next place proceed to give you a brief account of the Turks that live in Egypt, before I finish my Letter. They are so extreamly Superstitious, that when they go abroad in the morning, if the first Person they meet be a Christian, they return immediately, and having wash'd themselves, stay at home all the rest of the day; for they believe that some great Misfortune wou'd certainly befall 'em, if they shou'd venture to go abroad again." (Ibid., let. 16, p. 109.)

Post-Mortem Marriage.—A writer in the North China Daily News records a case of something like a post-mortem marriage, in which a Chinese girl, recently deceased, was married to a dead boy in another village. "It not unfrequently happens", he explains, "that the son in the family dies before he is married, and that it is desirable to adopt a grandson. The family cast about for some young girl who has also died recently, and a proposition is made for the union of the two corpses in the bonds of matrimony. If it is accepted there is a combination of a wedding and a funeral, in the process of which the deceased bride is taken by a large number of bearers to the cemetery of the other family and laid beside her husband." (Pall Mall Gazette, 5 Nov. 1890.)