Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/411

 Correspondence. 385

Simulatp:d Change of Sex to iiaffle the Evil Eye.

Some correspondence has recently taken place in Notes and Queries on the subject of dressing boys in girls' clothes in order to baffle the Evil Eye.^ The custom, as is well known, prevails in various parts of the world.- It is common in India. ^ When the birth of a son is anxiously desired, if a boy is born, it is often proclaimed that the child is a girl, in the belief that he will be safe from danger.* It was asserted in the correspondence in Notes and Queries that in the Aran Islands boys were dressed in girls' clothes. Prof. R. A. S. Macalister now denies that the custom prevails in Ireland.' " Mothers," he says, "dress young boys on the Aran Islands in costume apparently feminine for the sensible and sufficient reason that skirts are easier to make than trousers. I know the Aran Islands and their people fairly well, and can positively assure Mr. G. H. White that this prosaic explanation of the custom is the true one. I never saw a man more genuinely astonished than a native of the island to whom I told the " traveller's tale " about the gullible devil and his appetite for boys. As nearly as I can recollect his remarks on the subject, they would translate thus : — " Well, there isn't a man, woman, or child on the island that believes the like of that. But there was a man here with a notebook a while ago, and the people sent him away with it filled." He then proceeded to give me some enter- taining details of the notebook in question." This information will interest collectors of folklore. I have a distinct recollection that the custom of thus simulating a change of sex prevailed in south-west Ireland. The question is of much interest, and I would now ask if any one can give facts to show that the custom did, or does, prevail in any part of the British Islands. I may add that it seems to have prevailed in Scotland. "The infant, if a male, [was] wrapped in a woman's shift ; if a girl, in a man's shirt. "**

W. Crooke.

1 nth S., vol. ii., pp. 65, 137, 293 ; vol. vii., p. 493.

2 J. G. Frazer. Pausanias's Description of Greece, vol. ii., p. 266. ?W. Crooke, Popular Peligion and Folk-lore etc., vol. ii., p. 6.

••T. D. Broughton, Letters written in a Mahtatta Camp (1892), p. 81. 5y\'. (5r^ Q., iilh S., vol. viii., p. 58.

^C. Rogers, Social Life in Scotland frotn early to recent times ( 1 884-6), vol. i., p. 135.