Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/488

180 person it has possessed. Some think that the mere placing of the bowl causes the Jinn to withdraw, others that the Jinn enters into any creature, for example, the ubiquitous half-starved dog, which may eat the remnants of the victim in the bowl. Either of these beliefs would account for the frequency with which neshuras are to be seen upon waste patches of land just outside the village and rubbish heaps, localities likely to be inhabited by Jenun and favourite scavenging places of the village dogs. Others say that the Jinn only leaves the patient to enter into anyone who inadvertently overturns or breaks the neshura, for which reason, no doubt, the bowls are so commonly to be found just beside the narrow lanes leading from the villages, often at corners of these lanes where the traveller might easily stumble upon one in the dark (the specimen I collected for the Pitts-Rivers Museum was found in such a spot). They are sometimes, indeed, though rarely, placed in the very centre of the narrow tracks themselves. Needless to say, the natives carefully avoid contact with a neshura, but some of them are in the habit of spitting at it as they pass, an action which apparently does not disturb the Jinn and cause it to possess the person who thus insults it. The sacrificial meal and the offering of a neshura to a Jinn is very widespread in Barbary, and has been noted by Professors Westermarck and Edmond Doutté in various regions of Algeria and Morocco. From what I was able to learn of it among the Berbers of the Aures and the Arabs of the surrounding plains, the differences in the details supplied to me by various informants arise from the fact that the natives follow the advice of a scribe or sorceress when a member of their family becomes possessed by a Jinn, and that the advice of these experts is based upon oral tradition. I do not think that there is any real