Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/194

 and animals, and of their own customs and language. But this mythology, as described by Mr. E. H. Man, is almost suspiciously advanced in character. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Mohammedan or Christian ideas have been mixed with the native guesses of the Andaman Islanders. They are said to believe in a supreme invisible being, exempt from birth and death, named Puluga. He punishes sins, such as the unskilful carving of roast-pig (a horrid offence), both in this world and the next. He is the judge of the dead. His wife is green in complexion, and is named either Eel or Fresh-water Shrimp, and the pair live in a stone house in the sky. Here the idea of the "stone house" is necessarily borrowed from our stone houses at Port Blair. The conception, on the other hand, of a wife of an invisible god who is a green shrimp or an eel can scarcely have come from missionaries. We are compelled to infer that the spiritual god and husband of the divine shrimp is borrowed from the same quarter as the "stone house," the mansion of heaven. After all, it is not much more odd that the supreme being of the Andamans should marry an eel or a shrimp than that Zeus, the chief god of Greece, should love an ant, a mare, or a hen-cuckoo. By the shrimp Puluga has an only son, "a sort of archangel, who alone is permitted to live with his father, whose orders it is his duty to make known to the angels." Though invisible and immortal, Puluga eats and drinks, and shows his anger by raising storms of wind and rain, and by hurling lighted faggots. He seeks