Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/353

 Asinus in Tegulis. 45

mother is provided with an amulet against the roof demon (Agrath) ; ^ in Rome, the hostile magic, or the unfriendly spirit, was scared away by throwing over the roof a spear or javelin which had killed a man, a boar, and a bear, each with one stroke (Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 33, perhaps from Verrius Flaccus). The Armenians put the child on the roof if he is born and the mother's life in danger, in hopes that the lesser sacrifice will be enough. Elsewhere in Armenia, toy soldiers on the roof are set in motion ; while the Tagalogs of the Philippine Islands used in the early eighteenth century to keep away the mahgnant patianak, by the vigorous action of real armed men on the roof-tree, and also under the house.- Under the house also is the position of the child's father, among the tribes of the mouth of the Wanigela River, New Guinea,^ who relieves his wife's pain by the simple process of taking off his own perineal band. This is one of the not very numerous cases in which, the house being built on piles, the floor seems to be thought of as another roof, as the ceiling often is.

Once the child is born, it now and then happens that the roof can help directly in beneficent magic. In the Panjab,* if a child is born after three births of the opposite sex, one of the remedies against the ill-luck wherewith it is threatened is for its mother to sit with it under the gutter of the roof of the birth-room, into which, after a preliminary libation of ghi, the water of seven wells is poured.

But here, as elsewhere, the roof is mostly associated with maleficent magic. The best-known perhaps of the dangers which attend the infant is that of being changed by malig- nant fairies. The route followed, if not in taking away the true child, at least in returning him and removing the

^ Gaster in Hastings, E.R.E., art. " Birth (Jewish)," p. 655 a. 2 Samter, Geburt, Hochzeit, Tod, pp. 46, 55, 215 ; Frazer, op. cit. iii. P- 473-

^ J. R.A.I, xxvii. (1897), P- 20t,.


 * H. A. Rose in Folk-Lore, vol. xiii. pp. 64, 65.