Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/384

 348 The Binding of a God. ,

receptacle.^ There are several instances of this in Rev. Elias Owen's Welsh Folklore? In a curious Rabbinical tale referred to by Southey in The Doctor the demon is, by counsel of a prophet, put into a leaden vessel closed with lead. This is better given in an article by Dr. S. Louis on Palaestinian Demonology.^ In the same article there is also a curious tale given to prove that the devil cannot touch anything that has been counted, tied up, or sealed.^ Mr. Hartland adds : " Dasent's tale is given from Camors in the Pays de Vannes,'' where the child had been sold to the devil, and when he came the child persuaded him to turn into a mouse and go into a bag, w^hich he immediately tied up. There is a similar Breton tale, where the hero is a sailor, and the Bosj (some sort of demon) is persuaded to get into a gimlet hole in a tree;^ with which compare Ariel's penance, confined by Sycorax in a cloven pine." ^ In fact the idea is a commonplace of folklore.^

The result then of this discussion so far is that we have gone through a series of cases, the number of which it would not be difficult to enlarge, of the deity being estab- lished in an image. In the more primitive ritual this is actually done in a physical way — the ghost or god is caught, he is shut up in the sacred sesamum grain, which is then enclosed in a piece of holy wood and established in a shrine. In the later form the ritual has been softened down, and the god is only implored or coerced by charms to occupy the

' Hartland, Legend of Perseus, vol. i. p. 206 ; Folk-Lore Record, vol. ii. p. 176; Folk- Lore Journal, vol. vi. p. 152 ; Chambers, Book of Days, vol. ii.

p. 366.

- Pages 167, 196, 199, 212 sqq.

' Proceedings Society of Biblical Arclueology, vol. ix. p. 222.

'' r. 219. Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, \o\. ii.

P-3II-


 * Revue des Traditions Popidaires, vol. viii. p. 216.


 * Ibid., vol. vi. p. 538.

' Tempest, act i. scene 2.

' Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, voi. iii. pp. 999, loii.