Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/339

Rh many mansions, which afford an interesting, though indirect, light on their own views of social segmentation. It is true and natural that these beliefs are not very distinct and clear.

Here and there in this area, but not among Nāga tribes, we find legends that the first man was born from an egg. As a rule the Nāga legend brings their progenitor from the bowels of the earth,—already a married man, accompanied by a family. Since then, the supply of ready-made families has ceased. When working at the eschatological beliefs of the Nāgas recently, I observed that a belief, perhaps rather a tattered belief, in the reincarnation of the good and the annihilation of the bad was a cardinal feature of their system. I have been assured that incontestable proof of the truth of this belief, that men when dead return to life, is afforded by the startling likeness which children are seen to bear to some deceased relative. Nāga society does not always renew itself with new material. It sometimes gets old stuff back again from the stores of vital essence. Colonel Shakespear tells us how the Lushais believe that, "after a certain period in one of these two abodes of departed spirits, the spirit is born again as a hornet and after a time assumes the form of water, and if, in the form of dew, it falls on a man, it is reborn as his child. I have pointed above to beliefs which seem to give warrant for the view that only men are eligible for the intermediate heaven from which return to earth is possible. We find among the Nāga tribes that, if a woman died in childbirth, (an event of rare occurrence), the child was never allowed to live, because they believed it to be an evil spirit, a disembodied ghost, incarnated in the mother whose death it had caused.

What is the explanation of the rule which forbids unmarried girls to eat the flesh of male animals. I own