Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/449

Rh living. For bad luck and ghosts have this in common, that they are both conceived of as something haunting, clinging, difficult to be got rid of. It may be remembered that, when Mr. T. W. Thompson mentioned to a gipsy woman that he proposed to visit a rival family of gipsies, she begged him to do no such thing, for he would come back and bring all their bad luck and poverty and disease in his clothes and give it to her children. And only a few months back an Irishman told me of "the Parson's Bush near me home at Elphin, where a parson kem to a violent ind, and whin some men wint to cut it down it bled, and they had to lave it, for that was his shilter, his Purgatory, clinging to the leaves, for ye can have yer Purgatory anny wheer and they say the air is full of sperrits."

Just as the ghost is banished by burning its clothes, so, it strikes me, is the bad luck of the past year or season banished by burning its rubbish on the eve of a new one. It would take the wide reading, the industry, and the skill of a Dr. J. G. Frazer to work out and fully establish this idea, and I will now only mention one or two cases which seem to support it. The North Indian Diwali or Feast of Lamps is held on the last day of the moon in the month Kartik (October-November). On this night all the houses are cleaned, set in order, and lighted up, to receive the souls of the dead, who are expected to re-visit their homes. A woman takes a winnowing-sieve and a house-broom and beats them in every corner of the house, saying, "God abide and poverty depart!" The well-known Holi Festival of the Hindus has probably, says Mr. Crooke, been adopted by them from the Dravidian tribes. It occurs in early spring, at the full moon of the month Phalgun. On this occasion, in Nepál, a decorated wooden post is burnt in front of the palace, and represents the burning of the body of the Old Year, And among the hill-tribes of Mirzapur, the Baiga or village priest burns a stake, a rite which is