Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/154

144 "spirit scarers," life-size figures of human beings armed with spears, animals such as fish, crocodiles, birds, or pigs, and similar objects connected with their animistic beliefs, painted in colours on spathes of the areca palm ; just above the house ladder a figure of an armed man is often painted. A row of pigs' jaws often forms part of the decoration, but these are talismans or mementoes of sport, but are designed as a proof of the skill of the housewife in rearing large pigs for food. Models of ships, often seen on their houses, are only signs to traders that the owner is ready to deal in coconuts.

In Northern India you will notice many devices of the same kind—an image of Ganesa, god of luck, or of Hanuman, the monkey god, the emblem of virility; gods or goddesses at work destroying demons, and so on. Often you will see a figure of Mr. Thomas Atkins standing in a truculent attitude, but in the true spirit of conservatism in religious art, he is dressed not in khaki but in the red uniform of John Company, and carries the old Brown Bess musket which he used in the wars of the eighteenth century.

Sir James Frazer has exhaustively discussed the sanctity of the head, and the danger resulting from a person being over you in an upper story. There are various ex post facto explanations of the prejudice against building second stories in a house; that, as the Meitheis say, some people were once watching a boat-race from a bridge, the structure gave way and some one was drowned; that, as the Burmese think, a private house should not be higher than a monastery, and so on. All this is beside the point, and besides the idea about the sanctity of the head, people like the Hindus who are sensitive about personal pollution, naturally dislike placing themselves in a position where they are subject to such risks.