Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/483

Rh bright. The tales of the earthquake and the deaf Deity who is interested in the fate of mankind are also common among the Nāga tribes north. The snake legend is of peculiar interest, for the big snake,—rul-pi in Lushai, ghul-pi in Thādo, lairen in Meithei,—is a notable feature of popular legend. Colonel M'Culloch records, (Account of the Valley of Munnipore, p. 32), how sudden sickness was attributed by a Kuki of his acquaintance to the mere sight of a snake, while I have found the belief that it is a sin to see a snake, and one of those events which necessitate a special village genna (imposition of tabus). In Manipur we have the Pākhangba legend, and the Lushai story may be usefully contrasted with the U Thlen legend, so graphically described by Colonel Gurdon in The Khasis (p. 98). In the Lushai tale it may be noted that the snake appears when summoned by a virgin, that he is concerned in the unchastity of the elder sister, and that he requires human sacrifice. The curious will find the connection of the snake with unchastity is discussed at length and with much ingenuity by Mr. Crawley in The Mystic Rose (p. 193). I will only say that I have been solemnly assured that the lack of chastity among the ladies of royal blood in Manipur, upon which Colonel M'Culloch remarks (op. cit., p. 19), is due to their descent from a snake ancestor.

The Lamgang story of the lads who did not kill the tiger which killed their father and mother is, I think, to be explained by a tale which I heard among the Aimōl Kukis, where there is a clan, now called the Ningthaja clan (for Meithei nomenclature has been liberally adopted by, or forced upon, them), to which the flesh of the tiger is strictly forbidden because the first head of the clan was killed by a tiger. I have elsewhere been told that the family of a person who has been killed by a snake may not eat the flesh of a snake, and I suggest that the tabu against dealings with the creature which killed their