Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/481

Rh little blood and clip his hair and nails, as was done to the lai-ma-nai. The victim would be then released, the blood etc. being buried in the lai-pham. Those on whom this operation was performed are said to have always died soon after of a wasting illness. I have also been told that once a man was actually killed, and his blood, hair, and nails taken to Tegnopal, on the Burma road, and buried there, beneath a stone, in order to strengthen the god of that place, so that he might be able to drive back the evil spirits from Burma, from whose onslaughts the country was thought to be suffering. This offering of the extremities of the victim to the god is common among all the clans in the neighbourhood of Manipur. You will remember that Pākhāngba, who is the Chief of all the Umanglais, is a snake divinity, so that in this particular the Manipur custom is wonderfully like that of the Khāsis when they worship the thlen, for a full description of which I refer to Colonel Gurdon's book The Khasis, from which I extract the following (pp. 98–100): "There is a superstition among the Khasis concerning U thlen, a gigantic snake which requires to be appeased by the sacrifice of human victims, and for whose sake murders have even in fairly recent times been committed." "Its craving comes on at uncertain intervals, and manifests itself by sickness, by misadventure, or by increasing poverty befalling the family. … It can only be appeased by the murder of a human being. The murderer cuts off the tips of the hair of the victim with silver scissors, also the finger nails, and extracts from the nostril a little blood … and offers these to the thlen." If the victim cannot be killed outright, "he cuts off a little of the hair, or the hem of the garment, of a victim, and offers these up to the thlen." The victim of such an outrage is said soon to fall ill, and gradually waste away and die.

The Manipuri has three household deities, the principal of which is Senamahi, to whom the south-west corner of each house is sacred. In this corner a mat and a bamboo