Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/206

198 no dust. Awake! for thou art the trust of the sovereign and the judgment of the people. If thou art a sikìdy that can tell, that can see, and does not only speak of the noise of the people, the hen killed by its owner, the cattle slaughtered in the market, the dust clinging to the feet (i.e., self-evident things), awake here on the mat!

"But if thou art a sikìdy that does not see, a sikìdy that agrees to everything indiscriminately, and makes the dead living and the living dead, then do not arise here on the mat."

It is evident that the sikìdy was looked upon as the special means used by God for making known His will to men; and it is at the same time characteristic enough that it was thought necessary to "awaken" God (cf. 1 Kings xviii, 27). In the long list of persons through whom the people are said to have got the sikìdy are the Silàmo (from "Islam"), chiefly Arabs, who are also called Karàny, "readers", i.e., those who read the Koran. Several other Arabic words occur in this invocation, as well as in the whole terminology connected with the sikìdy, as will be noticed further on. Most of the names given above, in the list of "authorities" from whom the Malagasy are said to have received the practice of divination, are rather obscure. Among them is that of the "Vazìmba", who are supposed to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the island before the arrival of its present Malayo-Polynesian and Melanesian colonists. They may be mentioned either because the diviners were anxious to have the sikìdy connected with everything that was mysterious and pointed back to the mythical days of old; or, possibly, because the Vazìmba were really the people who first received the sikìdy from the Arabs, and that the other tribes in their turn got it from the Vazìmba.

It may be added that individual mpisikìdy of any repute seem each to have had their own form of invocation, or at least made considerable variations in the wording of it, although its general bearing seems to have been very much the same.