Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/70

 58 The Holi: a Vernal Festival of the Hindus.

We seem to reach a more primitive stratum of folk-usage when a tree, not a pile of firewood, is burned.^ In Kumaun, in the lower Himalaya, a middle-sized tree, or a branch of a large tree, is cut down and stripped of its leaves, each clan having a tree of its own. Young men of each clan beg scraps of cloth, known as Chir, from which the tree gains its name, and these are tied to it. A fire is lighted near the tree, and on the last day of the feast an astrologer fixes a lucky time for the burning of the tree. After it is burned the people leap over the ashes, believing that in this way they get rid of itch and other skin diseases.^ While the tree is burning there is a contest between members of the various clans, each striving to carry off a piece of the cloth from the tree of another clan. It is supposed to be lucky to succeed in doing this, and a clan which loses a rag in this way is not permitted to set up their tree until the insult is avenged.^^

By another account from the same region, on the iith day of the month Phalguna, known as " Rag-binding Day" (Chlrbandhan), people collect two small pieces of cloth from each house, one white, the other coloured, and offer them to the Sakti, or consort of Bhaifava, an old earth god. Then they take a pole, split at the top, so as to admit of two sticks being placed transversely at right angles to each other, and from these the rags are hung. The pole is planted on a piece of level ground, and the people move round it, singing the Holi songs in honour of Krishna and his cowherd girls, the Gopis. On the last day of the feast this pole is burned. Two days after thanksgivings are made for the birth of a child, a marriage in the family,

^Compare the burning of the tree in the agricultural ritual of the Celts, J. A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts (1911), pp. 200, ^265.

8 In Greece leaping thrice through a bonfire on St. John Baptist's Day (24th June) gets rid of fleas, J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910), p. 37.

^^ North Indian Notes and Queries, vol. iii. {1893), p. 92.