Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/168

140 one has taken an enemy's head is that good health will be the portion of the dreamer, or that he will enjoy good hunting. I have found that actually to do the thing and to dream of doing it have in popular belief the same meaning, and, just as to dream of being attacked by a buffalo means that one will lose all one's cases in the Courts, (for the law's uncertainties are as certainly uncertain in Manipur as in any other part of the King's dominions), and as any Nāga who has a case on would compromise it at any price if in the flesh he were attacked by a buffalo, so I venture to infer that the actual capture of a head may be regarded as bringing health and good hunting. But there are other ways of securing for the community at large these desirable advantages, village rites which are marked by strict food tabus, by the separation of the sexes, and by a sacrificial feast. In one village the young men go out together and try to shoot a hornbill, of which the feathers form a much prized decoration, and, if they succeed in bringing home a fine large bird, the village will be secure from all illness in the coming year. In other villages there is a village genna or imposition of special social tabus with a communal feast which has for its object the prosperity of the hunting season. So, too, for the welfare of the rice are there village gennas, while clan and household gennas are held on all the critical times of life.

Earlier authorities declare that no young man could find a wife for himself until he had taken a head and thereby won the right of the warriors' kilt, shown in Plate VIII., or of the necklace of bears' tusks and the wristlets of cowries. Nowadays these are worn as ornaments without much, if any, thought of the fact that not very long ago they were regarded as affording magical protection and as bringing strength. In 1891