Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/98

86 he will very likely say that the practice exists in some other village but not in his. Before the Taungbyôn festival, which will shortly be described, two hares are caught and killed, and their sun-dried carcases borne in procession through the streets and placed before the images of the Brothers. At the foot of Kyauksè Hill, south of Mandalay, are two mighty boulders called the Brother and Sister. If there is sickness in a house a dead fowl is bought in the market and offered to each of these. In most villages, though the custom has begun to decay, offerings of meat, fish, or other food are made to the village god on certain occasions. Lastly, every Burman offers food (including sometimes fish but not meat) at least once a year to the spirit of Min Māgăyi, the mighty Blacksmith, who watches over every house in the country; and an offering to the same divinity is placed at the top of the first post erected for a monastery. This offering may consist of fruit, cakes, a silk kerchief, or leaves of the sacred eugenia; and here we have the principle of sacrifice in its most attenuated form.

In the past no town was founded, and no great building erected, without the sacrifice of one or more human beings, whose death was believed to be necessary to the success of the work, and whose spirits afterwards guarded it. Even at the founding of Mandalay in 1857, it was popularly believed that a pregnant woman was slain at night in order that her spirit might be guardian of the city, and the pious King Mindon is said to have openly made offerings of fruit and food to the spirit, which was supposed to have taken the form of a snake. One of the gates of Kalemyo, in the Chindwin, is called the Koyin Gate, because a koyin, or acolyte, who happened to be passing, was seized and killed, and his body buried under it. There is a tradition that the architect of the Ananda Pagoda at