Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/100

88 local defenders. The Tamans are believed to have supernatural powers, and in particular to be able to turn themselves at will into tigers.

Though Christianity has made but little headway among the Burmese, it has not escaped them that it is founded on the idea of sacrifice. Perhaps this knowledge, added to the secrecy with which Freemason rites are performed, accounts for the almost universal belief that the Freemasons kidnap children and sacrifice them at their meetings. An intelligent Burman once told me that he did not believe the tales about this being done at every meeting, but that there was no doubt it took place at Christmas, at which season careful mothers did not let their children go out of their sight.

The eating of the god is a rite with which we are familiar in our churches, and we ought not to be surprised at finding traces of cannibalism among the Burmese. It is recorded in the Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States that when a rebel leader, who had been a monk and had a great name as a sorcerer, was killed, his body was dug up by a Shan chief (not, it is true, a Burman, but the Shans are as pious Buddhists as the Burmese) and the head and other parts of the body boiled down into a potent decoction. The Burmese legend of Tilat, still represented on the stage, tells how he was prompted by the spirit of Maung Min Dyaw, a victim of one of the kings of Păgan, to disembowel his pregnant wife and eat the unborn child, thus attaining the power of making himself invisible. In 1914, when I was at Bassein, a Burman was convicted of desecrating a grave in the town cemetery, and sentenced, I think, to imprisonment. He was found disinterring a corpse, no doubt with some such object as that above mentioned.