Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/379

 The Binding of a God. 343

same custom appears in Southern India, but here the Brah- mans have invented a characteristic legend of their own. " At other times the priests put the idols in irons, chaining their hands and feet. They exhibit them to the people in this humiliating state, into which they tell them they have been brought by rigorous creditors from whom their gods had been obliged in times of trouble to borrow money to supply their wants. They declare that the inexorable creditors refuse to set the god at liberty until the whole sum with interest shall have been paid." When the money is collected " the chains are soon dissolved and the idol restored to liberty." ^

We meet another form of the custom in the case of the Tyrians who chained their stone image of Apollo to the altar of Herakles in order to secure protection for their city.^ This idea of securing a mystic connection by means of a rope or cord is not uncommon.^ Thus Captain Lewin, describing a Buddhistic service, says : " The bowed heads of the postulants were shaven, and through their hands, from man to man, ran a white thread, the two ends of which were held by the priest " as he recited a prayer.* The practice of passing a cord across a stream to assist the return of the ghost is very common.^

Perhaps the best known case of thus securing contact with the god is that of the Ephesians given by Herodotus.^ " The Ephesians being besieged by Croesus consecrated their city to Diana by fastening a rope from the temple to the wall," a distance of nearly a mile. So the Kylonian suppliants at Athens sought to maintain their contact with

' Dubois, Manners and Customs of the People of India^ p. 299.

- Cur tins, iv. 3, 15.

^ Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd ed., vol. i. p. 117 ; vol. ii. p. 171.


 * Wild Races of S. E. India, p. 105.

Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, vol. ii. p. 46.
 * Ibid., p. 209 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol.ii. p. 326, Crooke,


 * i. 26.