Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/167

Rh "trieteric" agricultural rite, which has now become annual and which had for its purposes, firstly, the fertilisation of the new area to be brought into cultivation, and, secondly, some more remote benefit to the living and the dead, especially the recently dead. It has often seemed to me, when attempting by the light of nature to work out the comparative chronology of the village festivals in this area, that I ought to remember that,—(1) these tribes mark off the year into a cultivating and a hunting period with some sharpness, (2) that the festivals therefore which mark the conclusion of the cultivating season may also serve to mark the opening of the hunting season, (3) that the annual festival in honour of the dead that have died within the year also takes place,—when and where held,—at the end of the cultivating season, and (4) that it is quite possible that what were originally distinct and separate festivals, (a) for the end of the agricultural season, or (b) for the beginning of the hunting season, and (c) for the benefit of the recently dead, may now have been merged into two, or into even one festival. If hunting was ever, at any stage of their tribal history, the mainstay of life, it is intelligible that the commencement of the hunting season should be marked by a rite in honour of the mighty dead whose hunting prowess was still remembered. The Kukis still consult the bones of their dead chiefs, and the skulls and horns of the trophies of the chase form not the least important of the decorations of the graves of the dead.

To return to head-hunting, it is worthy of note that, in the gentle art of oneiromancy as practised by the Nāgas of these hills, the accepted interpretation of dreaming that